FDNY Chief Fire Marshal Michael Kavanagh said July 22 the city has recorded 235 lithium-ion battery fires this year, 70% above the same point in 2025 — the worst on record — even as fatalities have fallen sharply since 2023.

FDNY Chief Fire Marshal Michael Kavanagh stood before reporters on July 22 with a figure that has no precedent in the department's records: 235 lithium-ion battery fires in New York City since January, compared to 138 logged at the same point in 2025 — a 70 percent jump, and the highest the department has documented for any comparable period.

The announcement came alongside First Deputy Commissioner Daniel Flynn, who urged New Yorkers to charge and store batteries outdoors. What the numbers also show: the department's years of public-education pressure appears to be changing behavior — keeping fire deaths down even as ignitions climb.

The sharpest data point in the July 22 release is the nearly threefold increase in non-structural fires: 48 at this point in 2025; 137 this year. More fires starting outside, in garages and sheds rather than living rooms and kitchens, means more fires where residents can exit. That shift lines up with a steep drop in battery-related fatalities: 18 deaths in 2023, six in 2024, one in all of 2025.

2026 has not been clean. On June 26, a micro-mobility device ignited while charging in the kitchen of a basement apartment at 172-12 91st Ave. in Queens, blocking the interior exit and forcing a 48-year-old man to escape through a bedroom window. The department confirmed the victim died on July 18 — the year's first lithium-ion battery fatality.

Flynn offered a structural explanation for the volume surge: the same devices purchased during the e-bike and personal-mobility boom of the early 2020s are now aging past their safe charging window. "Devices that have lithium-ion batteries in them eventually fail to work properly," he said, urging residents to discard any battery that runs hot, charges incompletely, or shows visible swelling or leakage.

The FDNY's data arrives three days after Council Speaker Julie Menin pledged a package of e-bike registration bills at a July 16 committee hearing — legislation the Department of Transportation has already testified against, and that has not yet been introduced in any specific form. The battery-fire numbers give that pending push new statistical grounding: the open question is no longer whether the city has a battery-fire crisis, but which agency — the FDNY, DOT, or the Council — will be first to write a binding rule.