Lithium-ion batteries everywhere: fires from shoddy ones rising
One minute, Omar Ortega was sitting watching TV, his 11-month-old niece napping beside him. The next, his apartment building’s fire alarm blared and his mother screamed: “Fire! Fire! Fire!”
As smoke billowed from the building’s stairwell, the family, including Ortega’s specialneeds sister, as well as his dad, who walks with a cane, rushed for the fire escape in Ortega’s bedroom. Ortega, 36, carried his niece in his arms.
With the
March 11 blaze on Manhattan’s Marble Hill Avenue, the city has had nearly three dozen blazes sparked by a lithium-ion battery so far this year. Investigators found battery remnants and those of an electric bike under the four-story building’s first-floor stairwell, where the fire originated.
In New York and other cities nationwide, fire departments are increasingly grappling with rapidly burning, toxic blazes ignited or exacerbated by lithium ion-batteries in everything from electric cars, bikes and scooters to cellphones, laptops, power tools and vape pens.
A big part of the problem, fire officials say: Some of those products contain lithium-ion batteries that haven’t been safety tested and certified by an accredited testing laboratory. “We believe those cheaply made products are the ones that are mainly responsible for these fires,” said Daniel Flynn, chief fire marshal of the Fire Department of the City of New York’s Bureau of Fire Investigation.
As of last year, New York City law prohibits the sale, rental, lease or distribution of e-bikes, e-scooters and storage batteries that fail to meet recognized safety standards. The city has also made it unlawful to assemble or recondition a lithium-ion battery from used parts, or to sell such a battery.
Still, the issue is acute in New York City. E-bikes became legal there in 2020 and proliferated during the pandemic as food delivery took off and people looked for ways to travel through the city without using public transit.
The frequency of these fires is spurring FDNY and fire departments in other large U.S. cities to revamp their incidenttracking methods to identify battery fires and rework their firefighting tactics and training. They have also beefed up public-education efforts to let people know that the batteries can be a serious, and sometimes deadly, fire hazard.
“Lithium-ion batteries are a fact of life,” said Vito Maggiolo, spokesman for the fire department in Washington, D.C., where officials determined that lithium-ion batteries recently sparked an apartment fire and separately caused a highschooler’s cellphone to explode. “We just have to come to terms with the problem.” Fires involving lithium-ion batteries are challenging to fight, according to officials. The batteries can burst into flames in seconds, much like a road flare or firecracker. Flames spread quickly, accelerated by the flammable and toxic gases— including carbon monoxide, hydrogen gas and hydrogen fluoride, which the burning batteries release.
“We’re arriving to fires where the whole apartment is on fire before our first unit ever arrives,” said Robert Rezende, battalion chief at the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department. The toxic gases pose a risk to civilians and firefighters because they contain heavy metals, as well as compounds that can scar the lungs.
Water can’t extinguish these batteries; it can only help cool them. The batteries, made up of multiple cells, can reignite unexpectedly as additional components fail—sometimes days, weeks or months after the original failure.
“It’s kind of the Wild West when it comes to us learning how to put them out,” said JD Chism, a fire captain in Denver. Officials there are pushing battery-safety education ahead of a new state tax credit for e-bike purchases.
FDNY recorded 268 fires and 18 deaths caused by lithium-ion batteries in 2023, up from 104 fires and four deaths in 2021—when FDNY officials say they noticed a significant uptick. The department added a code to its tracking system to identify battery-caused fires.
In San Diego, fire officials created a list of terms to help them identify fires involving lithium-ion batteries. They logged 104 such fires in 2023, up from six in 2020. There were 16 battery fires in January 2024.
Fire officials in Arizona have logged 73 fires involving lithium-ion batteries since some departments began tracking the incidents last June, using a data-collection plan developed by the Phoenix Fire Investigations Task Force.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently created a national task force to help first responders better respond to disasters involving hazardous waste from lithiumion batteries. That includes the deadly wildfires in Maui , where the EPA disposed of some 30 tons of lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles and home energy storage systems.
New York Mayor Eric Adams recently activated the first of five public e-battery charging stations to help food-delivery workers safely charge their bikes outdoors. The City Council passed several new safety rules regarding e-bikes, including requiring retailers to provide batterysafety information and increasing penalties for the sale of unlawful devices.
Those moves came days after a lithium-ion battery in an e-bike sparked a deadly fire in a Harlem apartment building that killed resident Fazil Khan—the city’s first casualty from a battery-related-fire this year—and injured more than a dozen other people.
The billowing smoke trapped people on the floors above the third-floor blaze, forcing firefighters to perform daring rope rescues. “There should be some governmental action to make sure that those that are below grade are taken off the streets,” said Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu, a close friend of Khan’s from their time studying data journalism at Columbia University. “Fazil would be here if this battery had not exploded.”
On Wednesday, several miles away on Marble Hill Avenue, Ortega and his older sister, Rosemary, stopped by their burned apartment building, hoping to collect some belongings from their childhood home. As they watched from the curb, a crew that specializes in fire and smoke damage worked in the charred firstfloor hallway, bagging debris in black trash bags. Outside, a separate crew began installing protective scaffolding over the entrance.
Ortega teared up as he recalled how he had descended the fire escape with his niece the day of the fire, then waited, shaking, for his parents and his other sister.
Seeing his distress on Wednesday, a passing friend paused to offer Ortega a hug.
“At least you’re out,” the friend told him. “At least you’re alive.”
Experts believe cheaply made products are mainly responsible for the rise in such fire incidents