Flock is Literally on Fire

On July 21, two Flock cameras “exploded” near Albany, GA. FOX5 Atlanta reports, “Investigators confirmed battery malfunctions or equipment failures did not cause the blazes,” and that a criminal investigation is underway.

Criminal damage is very possible. A video by TikTok user @nbconstructon shows what can happen when lithium battery packs are punctured.^[1]

Assume the investigators are right: the batteries did not start these fires, and the hardware worked as designed. If a Flock camera did catch fire on its own, no one would find out. There is no reporting duty, no public failure data, no regulator collecting it, and no specification anyone checked before the poles went in the ground.

#The debris

The news footage shows what is left on the pole. The solar panel is intact. Below it, a melted black mass hangs off the mounting hardware where an enclosure used to be. The pole is still standing. On the ground underneath is a blackened patch of right-of-way with cylindrical lithium cells scattered in the ash.^[2] The cells are cylindrical, so the packs contain small cells rather than a few large pouches. The fire burned at the mount, 12 feet up, and dropped into the grass.

#The batteries

The older, bigger Falcon cameras have internal batteries and optional “penguin packs.” One teardown has the internal battery at about 205 Wh, and two variations of the penguin pack at roughly 216 Wh and 324 Wh. Permit specs cap the assembly at two external packs, so a fully loaded older Falcon could have about 850 Wh.^[3]

The newer models have a separate compute box (“picard”), mounted underneath the solar panel, with the batteries in their own enclosures. I am not aware of any teardowns done on it, but the weights are in FDOT permit drawings.^[4] Scaling from the older pack, two packs come to about 650–870 Wh.^[3:1] The total is about the same as the older model. The energy is just split across more enclosures.

Electrical code requires an energy storage system be listed — tested and certified as a system — above 1 kWh. Fire code provisions start at 20 kWh.^[5] A pole with two packs falls below both.

#Scale

To put those numbers in perspective, a typical laptop battery is around 50–100 Wh. TSA and IATA do not allow spare batteries above 100 Wh on planes without airline approval.^[6] Some might remember the Galaxy Note 7, which was famously recalled and then banned from aircraft when its battery started catching fire — that was around 13.5 Wh. The 200–870 Wh of lithium in a Flock camera is significant. Think e-bike.

Even if the incident in Georgia was vandalism, there are still 120,000 black boxes with 200–870 Wh in lithium batteries each dotted across the country, baking in the summer sun on the side of the road. If we’re guessing about 30 lithium cells per camera, that works out to 3.6 million lithium cells, any of which could fail (because sometimes things just fail, even for companies that have good QA and don’t cut corners).

#Test reports

Lithium batteries are tested, and test reports exist. Under 49 CFR §173.185(a)(3), the manufacturer and every distributor after it must make one available, but only “to an individual or entity in the supply chain upon request.” That includes Flock’s customers, but, presumably, not the public.^[7] Flock probably does not make the cells, but an assembled multi-cell pack is a battery in its own right, and needs its own test report separate from the cell report.

#Heat

Cell manufacturers are specific about temperature. The 21700 cells commonly used in packs like these are rated to charge between 0 °C and 45 °C (32–113 °F). Storage is rated tighter: a year at room temperature, three months at 45 °C, one month at 60 °C.^[8] A solar-charged pack sits near full charge for much of its life, waiting for a cloudy week. Lithium cells encased in black plastic or metal, hanging 12 feet above the pavement on the side of a Georgia (or Arizona, or California) highway, will exceed those temperatures during much of the summer.^[9]

Exceeding those temperatures won’t cause the batteries to ignite. Runaway starts around 130 °C, and sunlight does not get a pack near that. It will degrade and weaken them and cause them to fail more easily. It increases the odds that a minor fault in one of ~3.6M cells throughout the country will cause a runaway reaction that will end up igniting the entire pack. Those odds are increased further when a pole is struck by a moving vehicle, breakaway pole or not. A slip base is designed to release, so the whole assembly comes down and can be crushed or abraded. At 3.6M units, even a 0.01% increase in failure rates is meaningful.

#Permits

But that’s all speculation. Flock would call it misinformation, because some of my guesstimates won’t exactly match reality. The problem is that the real numbers are unavailable. They’re not submitted to cities or highway safety authorities (which are not great about safety to begin with). Flock doesn’t make test reports or spec sheets available to the public. And cities and regulators don’t appear to be asking — not even the ones in California or currently-burning Oregon.

The permit forms show it. Colorado DOT’s ALPR checklist asks for read-accuracy metrics, CJIS compliance, hotlist arrangements, retention and purge policies, removal plans, and liability insurance. Its only question about stored energy is one field: “Battery Back Up: ☐Yes ☐No.” Tennessee DOT’s application asks for an “[e]xplanation of how the ALPR camera(s) will be powered” and nothing else.

It’s not that state regulators are unaware of the danger — for solar lighting, Michigan DOT requires manufacturers to “[e]nsure the battery is United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) rated ‘non-spillable’, gel cell or absorbed glass mat (AGM) cell type and complies with IEC 61427,” and “[d]esign the system for an ambient temperature from -40 °F to 140 °F.” Gel and AGM are lead-acid, so the requirement keeps lithium-ion out of the right-of-way entirely. And 140 °F is 60 °C, above every lithium-ion charging limit there is. Lead-acid degrades at that temperature but does not run away. None of that applies to roadside surveillance cameras.

Even where permits do exist, Flock does not have a good history of building what’s in the permit. A 2025 Iowa DOT permit for the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office specifies a dedicated pole: 11 feet of 2½-inch standard pipe at 2⅞" outside diameter, an “X-SQUARED BREAKAWAY BASE WITH ROUND RECEIVER,” an “X-SQUARED SLIP BASE,” and a concrete foundation at least 3’-6" deep. It cites AASHTO LRFD for structural supports and tabulates base reactions for design wind speeds up to 135 mph. Flock bolted its camera to an existing traffic signal mast arm pole instead.^[10] Signal poles are rigid by design, because a support that releases on impact would drop signal heads into traffic.^[11]

The breakaway base and the slip base in that permit were never installed, because the pole they belong to was never installed. And, in a way that would have Franz Kafka fill out an application to roll over in his grave, Iowa DOT says it doesn’t perform as-built inspections, unless as-built differs from the permit. What batteries are hanging off that pole is anyone’s guess.

Tennessee shows the same gap from the other side. TDOT standard drawing T-S-23B requires a multi-directional slip base breakaway for pipe posts in the clear zone that are not shielded by a barrier. Steve Eimers, a safety advocate, found the installations and posted about them, and Flock replaced 16 poles in Tennessee. MaineDOT requires a waiver and an inspection for poles in state right-of-way, and has received no applications at all.

Flock’s account of it all is worth reading. CEO Garrett Langley wrote that the company had “kicked off a nationwide safety audit for all our poles, starting with Tennessee, where we fixed 16 separate installations.” Rahul Sidhu, Flock’s Chief Strategy Officer, put it more plainly: the advocate “found mistakes with our poles in TN (all fixed now) and we’re now doing a nationwide audit (with his advice). I expect he may find Flock poles with issues before we do, but we’ll fix those too!”

A company with 120,000 poles in the ground expects a private citizen to find its safety defects before it does, and is running its audit on that citizen’s advice. No DOT appears anywhere in that account, and how we got here — by years of drafting permits to safety standards so DOTs look the other way, while installers disregard what’s in the plans, putting the public at risk — is brushed off as a “mistake”.

The breakaway problem had a mandatory standard, crash test data, state regulators, and decades of precedent behind it. The years-long failure still had to go viral on TikTok before it was addressed. For the batteries, there aren’t even any rules to ignore.

#Fire season

The Georgia fires stayed small — a scorched patch of shoulder and smoke in the pines. The TV crew did not film the aftermath at the other camera, at 2416 Radium Springs Rd, but Google Maps shows it was on a mowed shoulder with no brush or pine trees nearby. Not a placement requirement, but probably the safer way to do it.

But we’re increasingly seeing Flock (and other) cameras along remote trailheads in the Rockies and the PNW, deep in fire country. An e-bike worth of batteries sits 12 feet up on a pole, where physical defects would go unnoticed, installed without DOT inspection or any meaningful permit process. There is a real possibility a degraded battery can fail when struck by a car, when it’s assaulted by wildlife, or when it simply fails on its own due to statistics.

To make matters worse, Flock does not — to my knowledge — inform its customers when this type of failure happens. Previous articles on Riverside County illustrate the point almost too perfectly: 500+ cameras without a permit, many in the Colorado Desert and the Coachella Valley — an area with typical summer highs of 104–120 °F. Palm Springs even reached 124 °F on July 5, 2024.

When Riverside County cameras are damaged, Flock reps send an invoice and a notice — “We will need to replace the pole to ensure the location is functioning properly as soon as possible. Due to the damage being physical in nature, we will be sending an invoice for the damage”. The Sheriff appears more concerned about where to route the invoice than about whether anything caught on fire.

We’ll inevitably have these failures. That’s not even Flock’s fault, it’s just math, chemistry, and physics coming together. Many cells across many cameras, hotter, drier summers, less snow, and overall worse fire seasons. This year is one of them. The country is running about a third above its ten-year average for acres burned, and the national wildfire preparedness level reached its ceiling in the week of July 20, with record-low western snowpack as the cause.^[12]

#Failure modes

None of this needs new science or new technology.

Standards can be written. Michigan DOT wrote one for the batteries in solar road lighting: a chemistry that does not create runaway reactions, a listed specification to comply with, and a temperature range to design for. Nobody has written one for the batteries in roadside surveillance cameras.

Standards that exist have to be followed. Tennessee has required a breakaway base for pipe posts in the clear zone for years. At least sixteen Flock installations did not have one, and nobody in the permitting chain noticed (or cared). An unpaid volunteer had to go viral for it to matter to anyone at Flock.

Permits can specify hardware. The Iowa permit specified a dedicated pole, a breakaway base, a slip base, and a 3’-6" foundation, with an engineer’s wind analysis behind it. Flock bolted the camera to a rigid signal pole instead. Iowa plainly admits it treats the permitted plan as the as-built and does not inspect — it does not appear to be alone in using that process.

Flock could disclose information and be transparent. It has test reports for its battery packs, because it can’t ship them without them. It hands them to customers who ask, if any, and nobody else. Flock likely also gets, or could get, reports from installers when cameras fail. If they are collected, they are kept behind lock and key at Flock HQ.

Cities, state DOTs, and contracts could each require any of the above. A permit condition, a bid requirement (if there is a bid), a line in a purchase order, a clause that says “tell us when one of these burns.” To my knowledge, none of Flock’s public safety customers have advocated for any of that.

That is five points of failure on one pole. Flock is not asking to be held to a standard. No regulator is writing one. No DOT is checking the work. No city is putting it in a contract. Nobody is doing the job, and the only people who are finding these flaws and calling them out don’t even work for Flock or any government.

To the company selling “public safety” and the agencies buying it, the phrase begins and ends at policing. It does not include the 4,000+ acre Springs Fire forcing residents from their Moreno Valley homes, or the Bain Fire upending people in Riverside and Jurupa Valley.

These hazards should be removed until Flock, the DOT, and cities get their act together.

Because safety is our fundamental right.