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

Grokmaster

Well-known member
Contributor
E-Bikes are killing New Yorkers on a fairly regular basis, as they burst into flames.

Nice.


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





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

His crime record is mixed, but public safety isn’t just crime: E-bike and e-scooter battery-fire deaths are reaching “staggering” levels, his fire commissioner says.

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

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

Three people from three generations of the West family, ages 33 to 81, perished.

As has become common over three years, the cause was a battery charging an e-scooter, blocking exits.
So far, 17 of this year’s 93 fire deaths are from such batteries.

Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh calls it “devastating.”

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

We’ve quickly reversed decades of progress. Between 2014 and 2020, the average number of annual civilian fire deaths was 66, including a low of 43 in 2017, the smallest number in a century.

Last year, though, fire deaths, at 102, exceeded 100 for the first time in 19 years, and we’ll likely top 100 deaths this year, too.

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

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







https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/w...p&cvid=a97b5cf7567a498d8fc9d1b986bd8068&ei=29
 
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