When will NYC do something about the ‘staggering’ number of e-bike fire deaths?

by


Nicole Gelinas

Opinion

By Nicole Gelinas

Published
November 19, 2023, 6:48 pm ET

Eric Adams ran for office on a public safety platform two years ago.

His crime record is mixed, but public safety is not only crime: E-bike and e-scooter battery-fire the dead arrive “Staggering” levels, says its fire commissioner.

So it is not good that the unrelated corruption suspicions swirling around the mayor imply. . . pressuring the FDNY to ignore safety rules, rules that inconvenienced donors and their friends.

The familiar story unfolded again last week: A powerful fire gutted a Brooklyn brownstone.

Three people from three generations of the West family, from 33 to 81 years old, died.

As has become common over three years, the cause was a battery that charges an e-scooter, blocking the sources.

So far, 17 of the 93 fire deaths this year are from such batteries.

Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh called it “devastating”.

Twenty-seven New Yorkers died in these fires from 2021, the year after the city legalized e-bikes and similar devices. (No one had ever died in such a fire before.)

We have rapidly reversed decades of progress. Between 2014 and 2020, the average number of annual civilian deaths from fire was 66, including a low of 43 in 2017, the lowest number in a century.

Last year, however, fire deaths, at 102, exceeded 100 for the first time in 19 years, and we are likely to be 100 dead this year as well.

This represents an increase of 51%, relative to the average before e-bikes became ubiquitous.

As the FDNY notes, e-battery fire deaths exceed electrical fire deaths.

So what does the city do?

Nothing that yielded practical results.

The City Council has banned the sale of e-batteries that do not meet Underwriters Lab’s safety standards – a law that has no way to enforce (council members do not want the police to sixteen illegal batteries by cyclists).

The council also directed the FDNY and the Department of Consumer and Labor Protection to launch an education campaign.

And he ordered the mayor to set up an exchange program, where e-battery owners can exchange uncertified batteries for certified ones, at the city’s expense — but Adams hasn’t set it up.

The only way to prevent more deaths is for the FDNY to call for a ban on residential storage and charging of e-batteries, just like banning the home storage of gasoline and other flammable or hazardous materials.

The current law, enacted in the final weeks of the de Blasio administration, on purpose exempt the storage and charging of “no more than five” such devices in a house.

And it’s time for the FDNY to push for the enforcement of different fire code laws that already ban hazardous commercial-industrial activities at home.

Most of the city’s e-bikes and e-scooters are used for food delivery – and delivery apps, such as Uber Eats, Grubhub and DoorDash, should be responsible for storing, maintaining and charging the equipment of its workers in commercial-industrial sites.

Only after a ban is the time to discover any exemptions: for example, the storage of one UL certified battery for a personal bicycle, registered with the local FDNY fire department and, if applicable, with the owner’s license.

But Adams remains passive about the infernal e-bike crisis.

Its fire commissioner, Kavanagh, blames food delivery apps and unregulated battery sellers, saying they have “blood on their hands” – even though the city is in the position of better regulate these industries, cutting off their markets.

Do you think they are going to regulate themselves?

And, surprise, surprise, Grubhub executives gave Adams $13,675 for his 2021 and 2025 mayoral campaigns (as the Daily News reported).

This may be a coincidence.

Except Adams is already embroiled in a scandal over pressure on the FDNY to ignore critical safety rules quick occupancy permits for a new building for the Turkish consulate when he was president of the city and soon mayor in 2021.

This pressure happened to help Adams’ financial backers in Turkey.

In his first year as mayor, Adams also wanted the Department of Buildings — historically perceived, not incorrectly, by real estate developers as more malleable to pressure than the FDNY — to resume fire inspection duties.

So Adams is already involved in a scandal for the suspicion of sacrificing public safety for the convenience of donors – when a different donor has an interest in maintaining the new business as usual on e-bike shipments, the the city’s biggest non-crime public safety crisis.

Well, maybe a different kind of crime.

No wonder the city continues to burn.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.




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