On the evening of 9 December 2025, a fire at a seven-storey building in Kemayoran, Central Jakarta, killed twenty-two employees of a publicly-listed industrial drone service provider. Fifteen women, seven men, one of them pregnant. Most died from smoke inhalation and oxygen deprivation rather than burns — the toxic plume rose through the upper floors faster than anyone could escape, because the building had no emergency exit.
The local CEO was arrested within 48 hours. The charges, filed under Articles 187, 188, and 359 of the Indonesian Criminal Code and the country's 1970 Occupational Safety Law, carry a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
We're publishing this because the OHS gaps Indonesian National Police catalogued in Jakarta are gaps any drone operator can audit against tomorrow morning. The facility was Indonesian. The architectural failure isn't.
What the police found
Investigators traced ignition to a falling stack of damaged lithium drone batteries in a ground-floor storage room. The stack ignited. The room — two metres by two metres — had no fire-resistant construction and no ventilation. It also housed a heat-generating generator. Employees ran upstairs as the fire spread, and were trapped because the building had no emergency egress.
The catalogue of failures is, on paper, almost banal:
- No safety SOPs for battery storage or handling
- No battery storage areas meeting any recognised safety standard
- No designated occupational health and safety officers
- No adequate emergency routes or evacuation facilities
- No ventilation or thermal isolation for the battery storage room
None of these gaps required a regulator to invent a new rule to identify. They were already failures against ordinary occupational-safety practice when the building was occupied. The fire revealed them.
The architectural failure underneath the OHS failure
The architectural choice that put the batteries in that room in the first place is the part the industry has been quieter about.
In any drone operation, batteries cycle. They go from charging to flight to inspection to disposal, and at each step they are physically touched, moved, racked, and — if a contact-charging interface is in the loop — plugged in and unplugged again. Damaged batteries accumulate. Batteries that have suffered a hard landing, a swollen cell, a contact-arc event during charging, or simple mechanical wear at the connector all end up in the same place. They have to be stored before they're disposed of correctly.
In the Jakarta facility, that place was a small, unventilated, generator-adjacent room. That choice is what regulators will write rules about over the next eighteen months. The supply-chain question underneath it — why are damaged batteries accumulating at this rate, in this volume, at every drone operator's site? — is the question every operator should be asking now.
A non-trivial fraction of those damaged batteries trace back to physical contact-charging interfaces — pogo pins, blade contacts, magnetic dock pads. Repeated docking cycles abrade the contact, raise the local resistance, and produce localised heating events that propagate into the cell. The damage shows up at the connector before it shows up in the storage room. Eliminate the connector and the population of damaged batteries shrinks at source.
Battery damage has many sources beyond the connector — flight loads, environmental cycling, calendar ageing — and contactless charging only addresses one of them. But it addresses the largest single touchpoint in the operator's daily workflow, and it does so without changing operator behaviour.
The 18-month forward look
Five regulators converged on lithium-ion fire risk in twelve months. OSHA's January 2026 letter of interpretation made personal Li-ion battery burns at the workplace recordable on the OSHA 300 log. EASA Safety Information Bulletin 2025-03 reinforced cabin-crew lithium-battery-risk awareness. The NSW Coroners Court opened a formal lithium-ion battery inquiry in December 2025. Queensland Fire Department logged 235 Li-ion fires in FY2024–25 alone. The ACCC tracked a sixfold rise in Li-ion product-safety reports between February 2021 and February 2023.
They're all moving the same way. The Jakarta fire gives the next round of rules a public event to point at.
For an operator running a drone fleet today, the practical implication is that the OHS audit you'd benefit from running this quarter — the audit against the five-point Indonesian police checklist above — is the audit your insurer, your customers, and your local equivalent of WorkSafe will be running in 2027. The cheapest version of that audit is the voluntary one.
What we'd suggest you ask
If you operate any drone fleet larger than a half-dozen units:
- Where are damaged batteries stored on your sites today? Is the room thermally isolated, ventilated, and free of heat sources?
- Are there designated OHS officers with explicit responsibility for battery storage and handling?
- Have you traced the population of damaged batteries back to their source — flight loads, environmental, or contact-charging-interface wear?
- Does your charging architecture remove the human from the battery loop?
The fourth question is what wireless inductive charging actually solves for. NOA builds Australian-engineered, sealed, contactless wireless-power modules for OEM integration into drone, AMR, ground-robot, and subsea platforms. The modules deliver up to 500 W across an air gap of up to 30 mm, with foreign-object detection that cuts power in under two milliseconds. There's no connector to wear, no exposed metal to oxidise, no operator interaction with a damaged cell.
We send a Dev Kit to qualified engineering teams so the architecture can be evaluated on-platform before any procurement commitment.
Twenty-two people died for a lesson the industry could have read in any OHS textbook. The cheapest version is the one we don't have to learn from a fire.