Commercial Fixed Wing
Confusion; Workload
Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Published Material / Policy; Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Hazardous Material Violation; Ground Event / Encounter Other / Unknown
Flight Crew Took Evasive Action; General Flight Cancelled / Delayed; General Police / Security Involved
Human Factors
Bag [on] ramp caught on fire. The reason was it was full of batteries of different sort. Some of them were lithium batteries. Bag smoked on the ground for thirty minutes then it caught fire. Took three fire extinguishers to put it out. This caused a flight to be delayed and had to move to another gate and possible threat of doing more damage not knowing what was in the bag. There was a tremendous amount of smoke that could have been poison because of not knowing what was in the bag. How can we avoid this happening again?
A ramp employee reported a bag of lithium batteries on the ramp near an aircraft smoked for thirty minutes then caught fire. The batteries produced large amounts of toxic smoke.