50 Buses Destroyed in One Depot Fire: What If They Were Electric?
A depot fire in Bekasi destroyed dozens of buses in a single event. This analysis looks at what the same incident would mean if the vehicles were battery-electric, and why earlier risk intelligence matters before fire, spread and operational disruption.
In March 2024, a depot fire in Bekasi, Indonesia, destroyed around 50 buses. The incident was not an electric-vehicle thermal runaway. It is still a useful reference for battery safety because it shows how a single site event can remove a large part of an operating fleet in hours.
If the same depot had been filled with battery-electric buses, the exposure would not have been limited to vehicle hulls. Stored energy, charging infrastructure, neighbouring assets and contaminated runoff would all have entered the event. Recovery time, insurance questions and public-trust impact would have been larger.
EPTTAS publishes this as a factual incident analysis, not as speculation about blame. The operational lesson is straightforward: battery-dense sites need a preventive intelligence layer that makes developing risk visible before one failure becomes a wider disruption.
