The Montreal fire department is asking city council to update fire safety regulations due to concerns about the dangers posed by e-bike batteries. Robert Rousseau, a spokesperson for the Service de sécurité incendie de Montréal (SIM), said roughly 36 fires each year are caused by lithium-ion batteries being used incorrectly. The city’s fire safety by-laws haven’t been revised since 2012, long before e-bike batteries were as prevalent as they are now. After Vancouver, Montreal is the second city in Canada asking for a bylaw about safer battery usage, such as charging big batteries outdoors. “We want the batteries to be stored outside of the building to prevent them from catching on fire and bringing the whole building on fire,” Rousseau said. Dr. Jinhyuk Lee, principal investigator of the JINfinity Energy Lab at the Department of Mining and Materials Engineering at McGill University, said lithium-ion batteries are safe when used correctly, but uncertified or mismatched components like wires and charging blocks can cause a fire. “There’s a certain limit to the voltage or the current to where you can charge your battery. But, if the battery charger, for example, does not come from the same vendor as the battery yourself, then basically the requirement could be exceeded by [using] some random charger,” he said. “So, it can also overcharge your battery and when the battery gets overcharged, then it can catch fire easily.” Rousseau said even battery repair shops should have to be in protected buildings. “If you want to modify or repair a battery, you need to do it in an industrial building. So, some buildings have safety features to prevent and to act according to this type of risk,” he said. Dr. Lee advised to never try to fix the lithium-ion battery yourself. “The current can flow between the two components inside of this battery and that causes a lot of heat. And that basically leads to the so-called thermal runaway. So this is one way that the battery can catch fire,” he said. “So never try to open your battery with anything sharp and metallic especially.” Rousseau said the proposed bylaw is meant to catch up to the high-powered battery technology already in use on many mobility devices. “Within 15 seconds, we reached a temperature over 1000 Fahrenheit. And the smoke generated by that fire is so intense that people can’t evacuate the building,” Dr. Lee said. The SIM’s proposed fire prevention plan has much steeper fines to help citizens consider safety first. The City of Montreal Executive Committee will have to vote on the review of the fire safety regulations.
