(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Lithium-ion batteries have sparked hundreds of fires across the leftist cities of New York and San Francisco in 2023 while injuring and killing multiple people.
The number of fires caused by lithium-ion batteries has “grown exponentially every year since 2021″ in New York, Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh said during a public safety briefing on July 21, the Epoch Times reported.
“We are now, unfortunately, seeing more and more of these kinds of extremely fast-moving, very powerful fires with some regularity in the city,” she said.
“As of this week, there have been 131 fires, 76 injuries, and 13 deaths caused by these lithium-ion batteries.”
In 2021, there were 79 injuries and four deaths from such fires. Since then, there was a significant jump in both injuries and deaths, with 2022 having 142 injuries and six deaths and 2023 exceeding the death toll of those past years combined.
Fires from multiple lithium-ion batteries have made headlines in 2023. A 63-year-old man was killed and 10 more people injured after a fire from a charging e-bike spread through a home in Queens on Jan. 20.
Another incident also happened in Queens when a teenager and a 7-year-old child died in a home because of a fire that erupted from an e-bike in April. Next month, four people died from a lithium battery fire that blazed through an apartment building in Upper Manhattan on May 7.
However, New York is not the only city that suffered from lithium fires, with San Francisco facing this problem too. Two people had to jump out of an apartment in the Tenderloin neighborhood on July 17 because an overheated e-scooter battery started a fire. One of them was taken to a hospital due to serious injuries.
Capt. Jonathan Baxter, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Fire Department, stated that it was the 24th time when a fire in the city this year was linked to rechargeable batteries.
San Francisco has seen 202 battery fires since 2017, which injured eight people and killed one. Of these fires, 58 fires broke out in 2022, which is up from just 13 in 2017.
