In New York City, officials are trying their best to curb dangerous e-bikes and e-scooters as poorly manufactured batteries in the devices continue to kill and injure city residents.
Only in the first three weeks of 2024, there were nine fires related to these batteries and eight injuries. Since 2019, the first year the FDNY began tracking data, injuries related to battery fires have increased 1,053% from 13 to 150 in 2023.
Last year, 18 people died in battery-related fires, up from six deaths the year before.
To combat the trend, officials have passed local legislation that prohibits the possession or sale of refurbished lithium-ion batteries . A committee listen on Wednesday in the City Council will discuss a list of more local e-bike safety measures. Gov. Kathy Hochul this month said that she plans to propose a project forbid its ugly. And the city’s public housing leaders have moved limit the number of e-bikes per household .
But security experts say the only way to really stop the threat is to regulate it at the source: as they are manufactured.
It requires federal legislation in most cases clearly divided and Less productive Congress in a generation. But, surprisingly, the regulation of device batteries seems to be one of the only issues on which House Republicans and Democrats agree today.
HA invoice is now pending in Congress to give the Consumer Product Safety Commission an explicit directive to create mandatory federal standards for how to safely build and import batteries. (Without this, CPSC does not have the regulatory authority to make a mandatory standard on its own).
New York Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Kristin Gillibrand and Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-The Bronx) started a push last year for legislation to give the commission the notice it needs to expedite the new rules.
Without that permission, said Will Wallace, associate director of safety policy at Consumer Reports, manufacturers would have to comply with safety standards only voluntarily — something many e-bike and e-scooter manufacturers have ignored.
“We’re nowhere near substantial compliance,” Wallace said. Without this, poorly made products flood the market, leading to battery malfunctions, explosions and fires.
As the bill moved through the House of Representatives, Wallace noted, it had a remarkable base of support. Last spring, an early hearing on the bill at the CPSC saw disparate stakeholders all saying the same thing: Please regulate.
“It was incredibly surprising because … you had 15 or 20 different people there from industry, from consumer groups, from the FDNY and everyone was there saying, We need a federal rule,” Wallace said.
Last fall, the bill achieved a rare occurrence in the divided, Republican-led House: unanimous approval.
Just after that the chaotic hunt for a playful new speaker, the battery bill sailed quietly through its subcommittee in early November. It again passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously in early December.
“This bill had universal support and was voted on with members on the record. It was voted unanimously on a bipartisan basis,” Wallace said.
From there, the bill must go to the floor of the House for a vote by the entire body. Representative Ritchie Torres told News 12 Bronx earlier this month that “we’re confident we’re going to pass it on a bipartisan basis this year.”
The move is encouraging, consumer product safety experts say, but it won’t just be an overnight fix.
First, the bill must be cleared in the Senate. Questions to Schumer and Gillibrand’s office were not immediately returned about their status there.
Even if the bill passes the full Chamber, and does the same in the Senate, a mandatory standard does not begin to apply to the industry for at least another year, experts said.
Still, the legislation is a good step for Ibrahim Jilani, director of consumer technology at UL Solutions, the product safety company formerly known as Underwriters Laboratories. He said he constantly hears from fire officials in the United States trying to figure out how to stem the tide of e-bike and e-scooter battery fires. Some are trying to replicate the local legislation that New York City created.
“I get calls from every fire department you can imagine in this country,” he said.
New York fire officials have been particularly vocal on the subject. Earlier this month, FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh traveled to Washington, DC to speak about the issue at the United States Conference of Mayors. She emphasized that the problem is “for nothing [only] a New York problem.”
“We met with a bipartisan group of legislators on the Hill yesterday and each of them had a lithium-ion battery fire in their district,” he said in January. 18 visits.
To Jilani, the solution is not only to regulate these specific lithium-ion batteries, but to make a federal mandate for any devices operated by lithium-ion batteries “or it will just reappear under another group of products and then there will be more. loss of life, more property damage, more injuries,” he said.
If you add up all the people who have been injured, died or had property damaged by various lithium-ion batteries over the years — from power banks, to hoverboards, vaping devices and power tools — Jilani says that it’s not just a few hundred but dozens. of thousands of people.
“This is a commitment to keep people safe from dangerous goods. And it’s been an ongoing epidemic for a decade,” he said.
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