NEW YORK — A faulty lithium-ion battery sparked a raging fire inside a Brooklyn home early Tuesday that critically injured a woman living inside, FDNY officials said.
Firefighters putting out the blaze inside a home on Goodwin Place near Greene Avenue in Bushwick found 50 lithium-ion batteries inside one apartment, which the tenant had transformed into an off-the-books battery repair shop, Chief Fire Marshal Daniel Flynn said.
It was not immediately clear how many batteries caught fire, but the blaze was so intense that the building’s working smoke detectors and sprinkler systems were absolutely no help, he said.
“It only takes one,” Flynn said standing next to FDNY Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh Tuesday outside the charred husk that was once a three-story building. “Having 50 inside is tremendously dangerous and having 50 that weren’t functioning properly — they’re set to fail. We’ve seen this several times throughout the city where people have these makeshift repair facilities in private dwellings.”
Both a fire alarm and the building’s sprinkler system were functioning, but the fire sparked by the busted battery was so intense that the woman didn’t have a chance to flee.
“When these fires occur, they occur so violently that it traps the occupants, so they are unable to get out,” Flynn said.
Firefighters managed to find and retrieve the woman, who remained in critical condition at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, Kavanagh said.
The tenant who was repairing the batteries in his apartment wasn’t home, but left several batteries charging overnight, Flynn said.
The fire broke out around 1:40 a.m. All three floors were ablaze when firefighters arrived, an FDNY source said.
More than 130 FDNY members were called in. The fire was extinguished in about three hours.
A second resident suffered a minor injury and was taken to Wyckoff, officials said.
“This is a critical safety issue for New Yorkers and for our members,” Kavanagh said. “We are coming at this problem at all angles but we urge the public to follow critical safety measures.”
Residents shouldn’t charge the batteries overnight and keep them away from stairwells or doors that residents would need to escape from if a fire erupts, Kavanagh said.
“We need people to treat these (batteries) as carefully as they need to because these are very dangerous devices,” she said.
So far this year, the FDNY has responded to about three lithium-ion battery fires a week, officials said. As of Monday, 22 fires, 36 injuries and one death have been attributed this year to faulty e-bike batteries that explode while being charged, causing a fast-moving fire that’s difficult to stop.
Kavanagh recently wrote to the federal U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission encouraging the agency to exercise its powers to seize “imported devices at the ports that fail minimum industry standards.”
The feds could also rid the city of faulty e-bike batteries by “levying penalties against manufacturers who fail to inform CPSC of hazards posed by products and seeking additional recalls of unsafe products,” Kavanagh wrote.
The City Council is considering legislation that would ban the sale of off-market e-bike batteries in the city as well as other new safety rules for storing and charging the batteries in residential buildings, fire officials said.
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