![]() China, where e-bikes became popular far before they did in the U.S., tallied 10,000 electric bike fires from 2013 to 2017, with more than 200 deaths, according to an official 2018 release. ![]() The London Fire Brigade says it handled more than 70 fires caused by electric bike and electric scooter batteries in 2021. Though the problem is seen in stark relief in New York City, given its close living quarters and electric bikes’ popularity there, similar reports come from around the world. ![]() By early December 2022, the city’s fire department attributed 202 fires, 142 injuries, and six deaths to such batteries, including one in August that reportedly killed a 5-year-old and her father’s girlfriend. A December 2021 fire from an electric bike battery in Manhattan public housing, for example, resulted in an adult dying and two children climbing down an exterior pipe from a fourth-floor apartment to escape. That Queens fire was one of 104 fires stemming from batteries for electric bikes or electric scooters, and one of four deaths attributed to those fires, in 2021 in New York City. A lithium-ion battery from an electric bike was charging when it burst into flames, setting a room on fire. By midmorning, firefighters had pinpointed the fire’s source. Barefoot, they watched as firefighters helped nine other people escape down a ladder.įirefighters searched the basement, where the fire started, and found a 9-year-old boy, Remi Miguel Gomez-Hernandez, already dead. “I immediately realized something was going on because the tenant who’d just moved in that day, who started the fire, was screaming in the basement, was saying ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’” Hayden alerted her partner and two daughters, and rushed them outside. “I saw nothing but black smoke it was dark,” Hayden says. the next day, Hayden says she heard “a loud explosion.” She ran to her apartment door. One August day in 2021, Hayden noticed a family moving into the building’s basement, which the landlord rented though it wasn’t a legal dwelling. She’d saved for years so her family could afford their own rental, choosing a ground-floor apartment in a three-story building in the Queens borough of New York City. At 29, Lanesha Hayden finally had a home of her own.
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