SteinwayTransitCorp
Well-known member
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.
So far, 17 of this year’s 93 fire deaths are from such batteries.
Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh calls it “devastating.”
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.
So what’s the city doing?
Nothing that has yielded any practical results.
The City Council banned the sale of e-batteries that don’t meet Underwriters Lab-type safety standards — a law it has no way of enforcing (council members don’t want police to seize illegal batteries from cyclists).
The only way to prevent more deaths is for the FDNY to call for a ban on residential e-battery storage and charging, just as it bans home storage of gasoline and other flammable or hazardous materials.
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.
So far, 17 of this year’s 93 fire deaths are from such batteries.
Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh calls it “devastating.”
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.
So what’s the city doing?
Nothing that has yielded any practical results.
The City Council banned the sale of e-batteries that don’t meet Underwriters Lab-type safety standards — a law it has no way of enforcing (council members don’t want police to seize illegal batteries from cyclists).
The only way to prevent more deaths is for the FDNY to call for a ban on residential e-battery storage and charging, just as it bans home storage of gasoline and other flammable or hazardous materials.
