BEIJING – Municipal authorities in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu province, have begun a citywide check on potential fire hazards, especially those related to e-bikes, after a fire in a high-rise residential building killed 15 and injured 44 before February 23 morning.
The fire was extinguished at 6 o’clock in the evening of the same day, about 1 and a half hours after the explosion, and the search and rescue work was concluded at 2 o’clock in the evening of that day. The fire is believed to have been caused by electric bicycles parked on the ground floor.
The 30-plus-story building in Nanjing comprises about 400 apartments, and is one of six buildings of the same size in the government-subsidized district built in 2013 in central Nanjing.
Like the other five buildings in the same neighborhood, the ground floor of the building, which is not built with external walls, was a public space that was transformed into a parking lot for electric bicycles, bicycles and motorcycles, where charging places for e-bikes. are also installed.
State regulation strictly prohibits charging e-bikes or their batteries or even parking e-bikes in buildings, both residential and office.
But builders and property managers have always turned the open ground of these apartment blocks into parking and charging sites for e-bikes. That the ground floor has no external boundary walls does not mean that it does not belong to the building.
To some extent, such an arrangement is even more dangerous as it puts all the residents who live above it at risk.
The wide open space and outer wallless structure of the ground floor, only acted as an air blower that fanned the flames and blew the deadly smoke into all kinds of corridors and pipelines above. It is an important reason because the fire could spread quickly from the ground floor to the top of the building.
Statistics show that about 80 percent of e-bike fires, which happen in an explosive manner in seconds, making it almost uncontrollable, occur during charging, and more than half of them occur during charging night.
Not to mention the fact that modifying batteries and e-bikes to raise their speed and charging capacity far beyond national standards is almost an open business in many cities.
About 21,000 fires caused by e-bikes were reported nationwide in 2023, an increase of 17.4 percent compared to 2022, in contrast to 18,000 fires caused by e-bikes in 2022, which increased by 23 ,4 percent from the number in 2021.
As the largest manufacturer and consumer of e-bikes – one in four Chinese own an e-bike on average – and a country that has moved most people into high-rise buildings in rapidly expanding cities in the last decade, the authorities are obliged to take more concrete actions to prevent that the most common means of transport in the country become a threat to life. CHINA DAILY / ASIA NEWS NETWORK
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