A woman whose husband was killed when an e-bike battery caught fire, sending fiery projectiles around the living room of their Vancouver apartment, is suing the Canadian e-bike manufacturer and a Surrey battery repair shop for damages.
Tim Lilley died on Jan. 31, 2022, in the apartment after the charging battery overheated and ignited in middle of the night, awakening him with a loud bang.
From the living room, he yelled “fire” and told his wife, Kelly Sharples, to get out, according to two lawsuits filed in B.C. Supreme Court
Sharples tried to reach Lilley, who wasn’t answering, but she was driven back by thick smoke, heat and flaming projectiles — the loose battery cells — that hit her in the legs and caused burns, the claim says.
“She escaped by shattering the bedroom window and climbing across an exposed ledge, four storeys above ground, to a neighbour’s balcony,” according to the claim.
The couple relied on several electric bicycles for their daily transportation, each of which had its own portable lithium-ion battery that could be recharged by plugging it into a household electrical socket, it said.
Lilley had plugged in one of the batteries from a Daymak e-bike into the Daymak charger on the night of Jan. 30, 2022, and “several hours later, when the e-bike battery reached the end of its charging process, it began to overcharge and overheat,” the claim said.
Lithium-ion batteries are made up of individual cells wired together and when overcharged, they overheat and can cause one or more of the cells to trigger “thermal runaway,” which generates more heat and causes a “catastrophic chain reaction which spreads through every cell in the battery pack, causing each to catch fire or explode,” according to the claim.
“The charging system for the e-bike battery lacked a mechanism to detect excess charge” and then cut the circuit to prevent further overheating, the claim stated.
It said that the fire spread quickly as “jets of flaming gas venting from the tops of cells in the battery turned each into a tiny, unguided metal rocket [which] ricocheted around the room, igniting new fires.”
“The fire burned with such intensity that it cause a flashover, a condition in which every exposed flammable surface in a room ignites simultaneously,” the claim said.
The two claims — one claiming damages for the injuries suffered by Sharples and the other for damages caused by the loss of financial support and of other losses to her by Lilley’s death — name Daymak Inc. of Ontario, and Royer Batteries Corp. as defendants.
None of the allegations have been proven in court.
Messages left with the companies were not returned. A message left with Sharples and with her lawyer was not returned.
The couple had each of the five batteries repaired or serviced at Royer, which advertised its services online, between July 2021 and Jan. 25, 2022.
The last of the five batteries were returned to them less than a week before the fire, the claim said.
