A fire at a New York City e-bike shop quickly spread to upper-floor apartments and killed four people early Tuesday in the latest deadly blaze linked to exploding lithium ion batteries.
The fire, reported shortly after midnight, happened at a shop that was cited last summer for safety violations related to the storage and charging of batteries, officials said.
"There was a very large number of both batteries and e-bikes," Kavanagh said at a morning news conference. "This location is known to the fire department. We have written violations at this location before and we have conducted enforcement at this location before." Chief Fire Marshal Daniel Flynn said the shop was inspected last August and later cited for safety violations related to battery charging, the number of batteries at the site and the electrical system. The shop was fined $1,600. Authorities recently surveilled the store and found there were many batteries there, but none of them were being charged at the time, he said.
He added: "I got a call from a neighbour ... and told me about the fire. I went to my shop but couldn't get close when they were working on the fire. I saw a lot of smoke. My shop is gone. I've been working for nothing for years."The blaze startled the neighbourhood in the middle of the night. In April in the Queens section of New York City, two children were killed in a fire blamed on an e-bike. Another Manhattan fire in November that injured more than three dozen people was caused by a malfunctioning e-bike battery, officials said.
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