Did California fire officials announce lithium deposits were found in January 2025 wildfire relief efforts, proving a "land grab" theory? No, that's not true: In a January 12, 2025, community update, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection announced it found "an underground lithium battery storage plant for bicycle batteries." The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors told Lead Stories this area was a basement storage for lithium batteries used in electric bikes -- not an area of land rich in unclaimed, unprocessed lithium, as was implied in the post shared to X.
The claim appeared in a post on X on January 12, 2025, with a caption that read:
#BREAKING: LITHIUM PLANT JUST DISCOVERED BY LOS ANGELES FIRE OFFICIALS IN FIRE AREAS
Andddddd THERE IT IS.
⚠️ This is MAUI 2.0
⚠️ It's another land grab involving lithium.
⚠️ DO NOT SECOND GUESS WHAT THIS IS AND HAS BEEN ALL ABOUT.
⚠️ They do not care about you, your home or anything else.
⚠️They will do WHATEVER IT TAKES to get the precious minerals and steal your valuable land.
Here is how the post appeared at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken Wed Jan 15 9:56:42 2024 UTC)
In the 21-second clip, a man in uniform who appears to be delivering a public briefing on fire-related situations says the following:
With the hazmat, we have found a underground lithium battery storage plant for bicycle batteries that has posed a huge hazard in that area. We are working with the hazmat teams to keep that contained, so a lot of that is just very dangerous. As you just heard, the air quality in some of that area is still very very high and dangerous.
The post on X suggested that the January 2025 wildfires were "another land grab involving lithium," implying that the fires were evidence of a nefarious plan to confiscate land rich in unclaimed, unprocessed lithium.
The area described by fire officials was not a "lithium plant," as the post claimed, but rather a storage facility for lithium bicycle batteries, as the speaker in the video clearly described.
In a phone interview January 16, 2025, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors told Lead Stories that the area referenced in the video was an underground storage area belonging to a bicycle shop that was destroyed in the January 2025 wildfires. The spokesperson compared the storage area to a basement, noting that it was used to store extra lithium batteries in electric bicycles.
The speaker in the video was identified as Jed Gaines, an operations section chief of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), who was speaking at a January 12, 2025, live-streamed update about the Eaton Fire in Los Angeles County.
The clip shared to X can be seen at the 16-minute mark in a briefing video posted to YouTube by ABC10, the ABC-affiliated television station for the Sacramento, California, area. An embedded view of that video is shown below:
Lead Stories contacted CAL Fire, the Los Angeles County Fire Department and Los Angeles Public Works for more information about the storage facility, such as its location, name and who owns it. We will update this article if a response is received.
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Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims surrounding the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires are here.
