By Liam Quigley / Gothamist

A garbage dump that has festered at an entrance to a Brooklyn park throughout the summer caught on fire on Tuesday after city officials said a lithium-ion battery nestled in its depths burst into flames.

The fetid pile at the entrance to Sunset Park on 41st Street and Sixth Avenue ignited around 1:13 p.m. Tuesday as parks workers loaded bags of trash from the dump into a garbage truck, according to witnesses. A 911 call drew firefighters who extinguished the flames.

Parks officials said no workers were injured, but neighbors say the fire was the predictable outcome of the ad-hoc trash dump, which has drawn rats to the area and attracted illegal dumping.

“I’m not surprised that a large battery got disposed [of] there, because there were people disposing a lot of different random things there,” said Lucas Nieuwenhuis, a neighbor who walks by the pile daily and photographed the explosion. “It’s a little bit of a quagmire.”