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New York’s Year of Battery Fires Keeps Getting Worse

Seventeen people have died so far. Officials blame a plague of cheaply-produced, unsafe batteries.

11/14/2023

Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A lithium-ion battery sparked a deadly blaze that killed three family members in a Brooklyn brownstone over the weekend, the FDNY revealed on Monday. Two electric scooters, powered by lithium-ion batteries, were found at the site.

Per WABC, the fire started in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights at around 4:30 a.m. on Sunday. Though firefighters arrived at the scene in under four minutes, the brownstone was already engulfed in a wall of flame. The fire ultimately claimed the lives of three generations of the West family: Albertha West, 81, as well as her son, Michael West, 58 and her grandson, Jamiyl West, 33. Twelve others were injured.

It’s a story that has become all too common in New York City. According to FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh, Sunday’s fire brings the total number of people killed by battery fires to 17. Two hundred and thirty eight total fires have been linked to the batteries, according to officials. When produced under accepted standards, lithium-ion batteries are safe, as The New York Times notes. But cheaply-produced, unregulated batteries for e-bikes and scooters are proliferating, particularly among delivery workers.

"We owe it to the West family to do everything we can to make sure we do not lose one more New Yorker to these devices," said Kavanagh. "We are on track to surpass 100 fire deaths this year. That is an extraordinary number not seen in decades."

Lithium-ion battery fires are notoriously difficult to put out, as our own Matthew Zeitlin explained earlier this year. Tightly-packed battery cells can give way to dangerous thermal runaway, resulting in fires that are prone to re-ignition. Batteries also do not smolder before exploding, making it impossible for smoke detectors to, well, detect them.

"They explode – and the second they explode, there may be so much fire at that moment, you can't get out," Kavanagh said.

Kavanagh specifically called out big corporations like Amazon, Walmart, Grubhub, and Uber Eats as the true instigators of NYC’s prolific year of fires. These companies are ultimately responsible for a huge underground market of low-cost and unregulated batteries, bikes, and scooters, she claimed.

“There is blood on the hands of this private industry,” Kavanagh said. She added, “We anxiously await to hear from the delivery apps and the online retailers who we have reached out to and not heard back.”

Charu Sinha

Charu Sinha is the audience editor at Heatmap. She was previously a news writer at Vulture, where she covered arts and culture. She has also written for Netflix, iHeartMedia, and NPR.

Sparks

Ditching the Paris Agreement Will Throw the U.S. Into COP Purgatory

This would be the second time the U.S. has exited the climate treaty — and it’ll happen faster than the first time.

Katie Brigham •

11/22/2024

Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

As the annual United Nations climate change conference reaches the end of its scheduled programming, this could represent the last time for at least the next four years that the U.S. will bring a strong delegation with substantial negotiating power to the meetings. That’s because Donald Trump has once again promised to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, the international treaty adopted at the same climate conference in 2015, which unites nearly every nation on earth in an effort to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius.

Existentially, we know what this means: The loss of climate leadership and legitimacy in the eyes of other nations, as well as delayed progress on emissions reductions. But tangibly, there’s no precedent for exactly what this looks like when it comes to U.S. participation in future UN climate conferences, a.k.a. COPs, the official venue for negotiation and decision-making related to the agreement. That’s because when Trump withdrew the U.S. from Paris the first time, the agreement’s three year post-implementation waiting period and one-year withdrawal process meant that by the time we were officially out, it was November 2020 and Biden was days away from being declared the winner of that year’s presidential election. That year’s conference was delayed by a year due to the Covid pandemic, by which point Biden had fully recommitted the U.S. to the treaty.

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New York’s Year of Battery Fires Keeps Getting Worse

Seventeen people have died so far. Officials blame a plague of cheaply-produced, unsafe batteries.

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