Lithium-ion battery fires are a growing public safety threat in New York City, and victims and their families are encountering roadblocks as they try to hold companies liable for the damage.
Attorneys say that’s because uncertified batteries, which are prone to explosions that are difficult to extinguish, tend to be manufactured in unknown factories or constructed in shops whose owners cannot be tracked down.
After 9-year-old Reimi Miguel Gomez Fernandez died in 2021 in a house fire that investigators said was caused by a defective battery used in his father’s e-bike scooter, the boy’s family tried to sue the battery retailer and manufacturer. But the corporation that owned the store in Elmhurst where his father bought the scooter dissolved the month after the lawsuit was filed, according to John Gianfortune, the family’s attorney. The manufacturer that appeared to have made the battery was based in China and impossible to hold liable.
“It really is a disgustingly sad case,” said Gianfortune, who still has an ongoing suit against the landlord of the Ozone Park home where the family lived in an illegal basement apartment. “I’m hoping I’m able to do something.”
The boy’s father, Juan Carlos Gomez Garcia, was severely burned while trying to save his son. Gomez Garcia had used the scooter, which had been parked in the backyard, for delivery work. The scooter's battery had been charging inside.
Reimi Miguel Gomez Fernandez
Lithium-ion battery fires are a proliferating public safety scourge — 25 people in New York have died and nearly 350 have been injured from such fires since 2022, according to the FDNY.
Attorney Robert Vilensky specializes in cases involving fires in New York. Since he can’t hold the Chinese manufacturers liable in battery fire cases, he tries to go after the suppliers. But the companies that sell the bikes and batteries are often “fly by night,” he said.
“I am unaware of anyone who has been able to sue a company that sells the bikes and batteries and has been successful,” Vilensky said. “There’s no point in going after a manufacturer -- who’s the manufacturer?”
Vilensky said he has represented more than 700 fire victims and their families. In cases involving lithium-ion batteries, since he can’t go after manufacturers and retailers, he said he looks at whether restaurants or bodegas that inappropriately stored their workers’ e-bikes indoors might be liable for fires that reach apartments upstairs. He also targets landlords of apartment buildings that lack legally required self-closing doors, which prevent the spread of fires.
“You don’t understand what devastation means until you walk through a fire scene,” Vilensky said. “My focus is against landlords in the hopes that landlords realize… that they need to protect their tenants.”
Makeshift batteries that lack safety certifications are often bought in informal cash transactions without receipts by delivery workers who want to keep doing deliveries and don't want to return home after their initial battery dies, Vilensky said.
To sue over a battery fire, lawyers must first prove that the battery was the cause. New York attorney Eric Hack was representing victims of a 2022 fire in Queens when he sued the retailer of an e-bike that the FDNY said caused the blaze. But after X-ray testing of the bike at an insurance company laboratory in Connecticut, Hack learned that the bike's battery cells were intact and even able to hold the charge.
“The fire department just assumed that it was an e-bike fire,” he said, but it wasn’t.
Paul Rosenlund, a California-based partner at law firm Duane Morris who represents companies that are sued over liability, agreed that the “cheapo” batteries are the ones that lead to fires — and those manufacturers are harder to hold liable.
“Even if you can identify [the company that sold the battery], the chance of getting them to appear in court in the United States and ultimately respond to a judgment is miniscule,” he said.
Rosenlund said consumers need to be educated on how batteries can explode if misused. “And that means you can’t mix and match batteries with chargers, you can’t mix and match batteries with bicycles,” he said.
The cause of the 2021 fire that killed the 9-year-old boy in Ozone Park is not in dispute. In suing the landlord, Gianfortune is arguing that it wasn’t just the battery that led to the boy’s death. Gianfortune said the boy was sleeping in a converted garage without means of escape, in violation of the building code. It was the first night that the family, who recently emigrated from the Dominican Republic, had spent in the apartment. They moved in the day before, paying rent with money Gomez Garcia made from doing deliveries on his scooter.
“He was just trying to feed his family,” Gianfortune said.
