Extinguish fire risk of electric bikes

FIVE STUDENTS died and 24 were injured in a fire in Guilin, the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, on Sunday. Beijing Youth Daily comments:

According to a news release from the local fire department, the battery of an electric bicycle parked beside a building for students ignited, starting the fire. The incident is still being investigated and some people have been detained.

This is not the first fatal fire caused by an electric bicycle. In December 2017, five people were killed and nine injured when an electric bike started a fire in Beijing, and in July last year, one person was killed and another injured in Wuxi, Jiangsu province. In fact, type "electric bicycle" and "fire" into any online searching engine and you will get hundreds of pages recording them.

How could that happen?

The all-too fast expansion of the industry is to blame. There are already 300 million electric bicycles in China, roughly one for every four persons.

However, when it comes to charging the bikes, a big problem has emerged. As a growing number of people live in residential buildings without separate parking lots, they have to park their electric bicycles in corridors that are often crowded with them as well as other items. Should a battery ignite, the fire will spread quickly.

Many owners like to place electric bicycles in the entrances, stairwells, basements of the buildings they live in so they can charge the batteries overnight, but this practice blocks the escape routes, causing the tragic consequences of fires resulting in many deaths.

The results of professional fire tests show that in a relatively enclosed environment, the battery of an electric bike can burn at 1,200 C within three minutes, and the toxic gas it produces can spread from the basement of a building to the sixth floor in 10 minutes.

There are regulations forbidding people to park or charge electric bikes in public areas such as shared walkways, stairwells, and emergency exits, yet the ban is often ignored because the electric bike riders need the vehicles for transportation and they cannot find any other place to charge them.

Some community management companies have been arranging separate parking areas where electric bicycles can be charged at night, and this is a good idea that should be more widely adopted.

It is to be hoped the fire in Guilin will make people think twice about where they park and charge their electric bikes, otherwise it is only a matter of time before there is another fatal fire.