Debra Li

debra_lidan@163.com

AS the country celebrated the Lantern Festival, the grand finale of the Spring Festival holiday, this past Saturday, 15 people in Nanjing, the capital of East China’s Jiangsu Province, lost their lives in a residential building fire in the Yuhuatai District.

Another 44 were hospitalized with injuries sustained during the fire, with one in critical condition and one seriously injured. The fire started in the early hours of Friday, most likely triggered by electric bikes parked inside on the ground floor of building No. 6 in the Mingshang Xiyuan housing estate.

Early Saturday morning, Nanjing mayor Chen Zhichang expressed his grief and expressed his condolences to the victims’ families and the injured individuals during a press conference. He pledged to thoroughly investigate the cause of the fire, holding those responsible accountable.

It’s commendable that city authorities responded to the accident in a timely manner by briefing the public about what had happened and promising to investigate the disaster so that future tragedies might be prevented.

The loss of lives could have been prevented in the first place. The building that caught on fire is densely populated because it is used for public-rent apartments or as compensation for citizens whose old apartments used to stand on the parcel of land. The building’s residents are mostly young renters. The first floor is meant as an open public space for leisure, but has long been occupied by electric bikes because many residents couldn’t find convenient parking in the housing estate.

As early as 2022, a law-themed program on a local TV channel highlighted the potential fire hazard of Mingshang Xiyuan to draw attention to the fact that the first floor of every building was overflowing with electric bikes. A then resident said during the interview that more than 180 e-bikes were parked in the first floor of building No. 2 in spite of regulations that came into effect in 2019 which forbade parking e-bikes in the corridors of buildings.

Electric bikes were not the only thing parked there. Many residents had installed electric chargers onto the walls so that they could conveniently charge their vehicles in the public space. There were also social media posts complaining about e-bike charging in the neighborhood in 2020.

However, none of these voices were loud or authoritative enough to caution the housing estate management to address these concerns.

As early as 2017, the Ministry of Public Security strictly prohibited the parking and charging of e-bikes in buildings’ corridors, stairwells, safety exits, and other public areas.

Despite efforts to rectify safety hazards related to electric bicycles, accidents triggered by e-bikes are reported from time to time. One horrid event caught people’s attention in 2021 when a 5-month-old baby had to be sent to intensive care with her eight fingers later amputated after an e-bike exploded in an elevator in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province. It’s such a pity that people’s memories don’t seem good enough when it comes to tragedies.

There were 350 million e-bikes on Chinese roads as of the end of 2022, as per the statistics from the China Bicycle Association. This equates to one e-bike for every four Chinese citizens. This large number of e-bikes has given rise to new management challenges.

Ideally, there should be designated outdoor spaces for parking and charging e-bikes in housing estates and near commercial buildings. When old housing estates don’t have the extra spaces, the management needs to, at a minimum, refurbish areas for e-bike parking by adding firefighting facilities, fireproofing, and smoke monitors.

Residents themselves should also obey the fire safety rules, refrain from cluttering their corridors with stuff, remember to keep the doors to the stairways closed all the times, and regularly participate in community-arranged fire drills.

The Nanjing building fire serves as a sobering reminder that safety is non-negotiable and must never be compromised for convenience. It is crucial to immediately address and rectify hidden safety hazards before they lead to another tragedy.

(The author is a Features editor of Shenzhen Daily.)