Mayor Adams and Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh both visited the Bronx on Sunday after a small e-scooter charging in the back of a supermarket exploded and caused a massive fire that injured several and took hours for the FDNY to stop. So far one person died this year and last year, 6 people died and 147 were injured in more than 200 fires caused by exploding lithium-ion batteries in New York City.
Delivery companies should be also held accountable for letting their employees use defective batteries
Mayor Adams and Fire Commissioner Kavanah are supported by the head of the firefighters union as well as State lawmakers in their calls to create new laws to stop e-bikes explosion fires that have recently been ravaging the city.
Andrew Ansbor, head of the firefighter union is also calling on delivery companies to be held responsible for allowing their employees to use black market e-bike batteries to make deliveries. He said “If a UPS driver hits someone, UPS gets sued. If a Door Dash employee’s bike explodes and kills the people upstairs no one knows anything about it. ”
Some delivery companies are taking e-bike battery safety very seriously. For example Dutch-X delivery in Soho only used certified batteries that are carefully charged at their location on a special wall. One of the owner told media that he understood why some are tempted to cut corners. A certified e-bike costs between $2500 to $3000 while a non certified one costs $1500.
In Albany, Senator Liz Kreuger and Assemblyman Jeff Dinowitz have been introducing new bills yesterday to require lithium-ion batteries sold in New York to meet specific standards and to ban the sale of refurbished and used batteries for e-scooters and e-bikes.