E-bike battery fire in NYC leaves 3 kids injured, including 2 critically: FDNY
Three children were injured – two critically – when an e-bike battery in their Manhattan apartment caught fire, trapping them in the flames, the FDNY said Sunday.
An adult also was critically injured in the blaze, which tore through the fifth-floor home at 165 Sherman Ave. in Inwood in Upper Manhattan around 1:30 a.m., officials said.
“The family in the apartment was sleeping,” FDNY Chief of Operations John Esposito said at an afternoon news conference. “The battery was charging overnight, and it was charging in the path of egress to get out of the apartment. So when the battery overheated and started the fire, it blocked the egress out of the apartment trapping the family.”
Two people escaped the blaze and were able to run past the battery, which was being charged, and out into a hallway. The bike was not attached to the battery at the time.
Esposito said firefighters, who responded to the scene in under 3 minutes, had to break down the apartment door because it had locked behind two residents who escaped. The apartment also had no smoke detectors, he said.
The victims’ names, ages and genders were not released.
Fires caused by e-bike batteries killed six people in the city in 2022, officials said. A lithium battery was blamed for a fire in College Point, Queens, in September that left an 8-year-old girl dead and two adults seriously injured. Fire officials said an electric-scooter battery caused the blaze.
“We try to remind all New Yorkers about the dangers of these lithium ion batteries,” Esposito said. “We should not be charging them overnight. We should not be charging them in the path of egress from the apartment. A suggestion would be to charge them while you’re awake in a room that nobody is in with the door closed.”
The rate at which a battery fire spreads also poses a challenge.
“It doesn’t smolder,” Esposito said. “It goes from zero to 100 very, very quickly, in seconds.”