Terra Drone Fire Turns Spotlight on Indonesia’s Urban Safety Gaps in the Age of Batteries and High-Tech Workplaces

JAKARTA, investortrust.id – The deadly fire at the Terra Drone Indonesia office in Kemayoran, Central Jakarta, has exposed a stark contradiction at the heart of Indonesia’s urban transformation: cutting-edge technology businesses operating inside buildings whose basic safety systems have not kept up with new risks.

At least 22 people were killed and 19 injured when a blaze ripped through the seven-storey building on Jalan Letjen Suprapto around midday on Tuesday, 9 December 2025. Most of the victims, seven men and 15 women, are believed to have died from smoke inhalation after being trapped on upper floors during lunch break.

Police and fire authorities say the fire is suspected to have started on the first floor in a storage and testing area, with early indications pointing to burning or malfunctioning batteries used for drones. Investigators are also examining the possibility of an electrical short circuit as a trigger. The National Police forensics laboratory is still working to determine the definitive cause.

Eyewitness accounts describe thick black smoke racing up stairwells and into office spaces on the second to sixth floors, where many employees were resting. Emergency footage showed some workers escaping using portable ladders from higher floors, while firefighters carried out body bags as they cooled the structure.

A High-Tech Company at the Center of a Low-Tech Safety Failure

The building houses Terra Drone Indonesia, the local arm of Terra Drone Corporation, a Japanese industrial drone company. Terra Drone Corporation, headquartered in Tokyo, was founded in 2016 and has rapidly expanded through acquisitions and partnerships to become one of the world’s largest providers of industrial drone services, with a presence in more than 20–25 countries.

Globally, Terra Drone offers aerial surveys, infrastructure inspection, LiDAR mapping and data analysis for sectors such as oil and gas, mining, construction, utilities and renewable energy.

In Indonesia, Terra Drone Indonesia – formerly PT Aero Geosurvey Indonesia – specializes in drone-based aerial mapping, modeling, inspection, and monitoring. Company materials highlight work across oil and gas, construction, mining, plantations, energy and utilities, with projects covering hundreds of thousands of hectares, including dam sites and complex terrain where conventional surveying is slow and risky.

The Jakarta office, located in a shophouse-type commercial building in Kemayoran, functioned as a hub for these activities.

That a company building its brand on industrial safety and efficiency from the air is now at the center of one of Jakarta’s worst office fires underscores a broader problem: Indonesia’s safety regime for dense urban buildings, batteries and new electrified equipment is not keeping pace with the speed of technological adoption.

Batteries, Electricity and a Pattern of Urban Fires

While the precise technical cause of the Terra Drone fire is still under investigation, the broad risk profile is familiar. Data from Jakarta’s fire and disaster agencies show that electrical faults remain the dominant cause of urban fires, often linked to overloaded circuits, aging installations or unsafe modifications. In DKI Jakarta, officials have repeatedly stated that around 60% of fires are triggered by electrical short circuits, making them the leading cause of incidents in the capital.

At the same time, the city is just beginning to grapple with the next layer of risk: high-energy batteries in electric vehicles, personal devices and industrial equipment. The provincial government recently launched initiatives to strengthen preparedness for battery-related fires, recognizing that they behave differently from conventional fuel or wiring fires and may require different detection, suppression and evacuation strategies.

The Terra Drone case sits squarely at that intersection. A technology firm whose core business depends on lithium-based drone batteries appears to have been operating with storage and testing facilities on the lower floor of an office building, in close proximity to densely occupied workspaces above.

If confirmed, a battery malfunction or charging incident in such a setting would raise urgent questions about how Indonesia regulates battery storage rooms and fire-proofing requirements, charging infrastructure and ventilation standards, automatic detection and suppression systems in mixed-use office buildings, and evacuation routes in narrow, multi-storey shophouse structures.

From One Building to 10,000: The Regulatory Challenge

What makes the Terra Drone incident particularly alarming for safety experts is its transferability: the risk profile is not unique to one company or one building. Across Jakarta and other major cities, thousands of offices, co-working spaces, and tech startups are located in mid-rise, retrofitted shop-houses or older office blocks, packed with servers, chargers, power strips, backup batteries and electronic equipment, and operating beyond the assumptions of legacy fire codes designed for a pre-battery, pre-startup era.

Jakarta’s own data show hundreds of building fires each year, with only a subset making national headlines. The surge of electrified mobility, expanding data centers and growth of drone, robotics and hardware startups add new layers of risk that building managers, inspectors and insurers must now integrate into their assessments.