4 Die in NYC Fire That Began at E-Bike Shop Near Chinatown

Four people were killed Tuesday morning, including a 71-year-old man and a 65-year-old woman, after a fire tore through a Manhattan e-bike service store that the New York City Fire Department had cited for several violations.

The three-alarm fire, at 80 Madison Street near the Chinatown neighborhood, started around 12:15 a.m. and spread through the store. About 140 firefighters and emergency personnel came to the six-story building, which includes residential apartments above the ground floor.

Six adults were taken to three area hospitals, where four of them — two women and two men — died. The other two, both women, were in critical condition, the police said.

Tuesday morning’s fire left soot smeared above the broken-out windows of the building, which also houses a deli, a laundromat and a news stand. A mountain of charred e-bikes and scooters was piled up on the corner.

“It is very clear that this was caused by lithium-ion batteries and e-bikes,” the fire commissioner, Laura Kavanagh, said at a Tuesday news conference at the scene of the blaze.

Such batteries are now one of the leading causes of fire deaths in the city. As e-bikes and scooters have become ubiquitous in New York since the pandemic, where they are widely used by delivery workers and for general transport, officials have grappled with the flammability of their power sources, inspecting stores and issuing warnings after each fatality.

The Chinatown store, HQ Ebike Repair, had been cited by the Fire Department in August for violations related to charging lithium-ion batteries, as well as for the number of batteries and vehicles they had at the location, according to Daniel E. Flynn, chief fire marshal.

The store was found guilty in court and fined $1,600, he said. The department also issued violations to the business in 2021.

“We did do some surveillance recently at the location,” Mr. Flynn said, adding that investigators saw “many, many batteries,” though none were being charged at the time.

Reached by phone before the news conference, Biyun Liu, whose family opened the store about two and a half years ago, said he did not believe the e-bikes caused Tuesday’s fire.

“We turn off all the electric panels and we don’t charge anything inside the store. So there’s no way to catch fire,” he said.

Lithium-ion batteries, which also power devices like phones, laptops and power tools, have started 108 fires in New York City so far this year, Commissioner Kavanaugh said, and have led to 13 deaths. About 200 fires were linked to the batteries in 2022.

Fire officials and battery experts have said that the lithium batteries can catch fire even when they are not being charged.

In April, two siblings, a 19-year-old girl and her 7-year-old brother, were killed in an “explosion of fire” caused by an e-bike that was being charged near the front door of an apartment building in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens. In early May, a fire killed four people in an apartment in Washington Heights, where lithium batteries were later found.

“The volume of fire created by these lithium-ion batteries is incredibly deadly,” Commissioner Kavanagh said Tuesday morning. “We’ve said this over and over: It can make it nearly impossible to get out in time.”

Belal Alayah, who was working Tuesday morning at his family’s deli on the corner, said he was about to close up shop around midnight when a customer ran in and told him about the fire. Mr. Alayah, 25, said he walked outside and saw “a circle of flames” burning through the e-bike store’s metal gate.

“It looked like it was melting,” he said. He called 911.

Within minutes, smoke filled the block, including his deli. “We packed our bags and ran out,” he said.

The Red Cross said in a tweet that it was providing emergency shelter for eight households, comprising 23 adults and two children.

For many neighbors, the warning was the smell of smoke that wafted into their homes.

Shirley Ngai, who lives in a third-floor apartment above the store, said she was heading to bed when her mother smelled smoke. Ms. Ngai, 54, looked out the apartment door and then called back to her mother, who is 85, blind and has dementia.

“There’s black smoke everywhere, we’ve got to get out,” she recalled. “I just grabbed my mom and said, ‘Let’s go, let’s go.’”

Mr. Alayah, the deli worker, said he stood on the block with about 200 others, as sirens blared and people screamed, watching as firefighters broke windows and worked to extinguish the flames.

At around 3 a.m., firefighters began removing charred bikes from the store and piling them on the corner in front of his shop.

Jacky Wong, coordinator of Chinatown Community Land Trust, a nonprofit that advocates shared ownership to build financial equity, said that fires in the neighborhood were becoming more common because of e-bikes and buildings that were so old they were no longer up to code.

“Local housing advocates and policymakers have failed to address this issue for the past 40 years,” he said.

In March, New York City adopted laws that ban the sale or lease of e-bikes and e-scooters that fail to meet safety standards and also prohibit the refurbishing of used lithium batteries.

Mayor Eric Adams announced a plan calling for the creation of a fire marshal task force focused on identifying high-risk situations and fire code violations. Fire officials have also shut down illegal charging stations in bike shops and bodegas.

Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president, said Tuesday that the City Council was considering measures that would establish a program to buy back spent batteries, and that would install safe charging stations.

“There’s a lot more we have to do, because there are approximately 65,000 e-bikes already in the city used for delivery by delivery workers,” he said.

Mable Chan contributed reporting.