Skip scooters were suspended from D.C. for 30 days after a fire.

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The District Department of Transportation has suspended scooter company Skip from operating in the District for at least 30 days after a lithium battery fire in the company’s downtown warehouse, multiple outlets have reported.

“DDOT’s priority is to maintain the safety of the public space and will continue to monitor the situation over the coming days,” the city transportation agency said in a statement to the Washington Post. “The suspension requires that all Skip branded vehicles are removed from the public space in the next 24 hours.”

The city notified Skip of the suspension late Wednesday afternoon. Late Wednesday night, Skip tweeted that it was complying with the order, and said that the warehouse fire “was not an issue with scooters in the field, either deployed or charging.”

The warehouse fire started in a bin full of lithium batteries in the basement on Tuesday night just before midnight, says D.C. Fire spokesperson Vito Maggiolo. Smoke from the fire triggered the basement sprinkler system, which contained the fire to the immediate area and automatically triggered a call to the fire department. The department has ruled it an accidental fire, Maggiolo says.

Skip said in a statement on Twitter that the fire was not a scooter fire, and was not a charging-related fire. “The storage bin contained batteries removed as a result of the proper operation of Skip’s quality control process,” the company wrote. “Our D.C. warehouse team is working with experts to expedite the disposal of used batteries and is fully cooperating in the investigation.”

The latest fire comes after a parked Skip scooter caught fire on a sidewalk in late May. The company suspended operations for a short time after that fire, too, though it said at the time that they had “no reason to believe this affects any other vehicles in our fleet.” Skip reportedly addressed some “risk factors” that made it more likely for a fire like this to happen again, DDOT told the Post, though the agency did not specify what those risk factors were. The company put tamper-resistant battery cages on the scooters. The company found the cause of the fire was likely to be some kind of damage to the scooter, reports the Post.

There have also been additional fires at the Skip warehouse. Maggiolo tells DCist that the department responded to a very similar fire in September 2018, in the same basement storage area. That time, a scooter in charging mode went up in flames and triggered the smoke alarms and the sprinkler system. That fire was also ruled accidental, and “the result of an unspecified electrical event.”

The Washington Post reports that there was yet another warehouse fire in October. DDOT reportedly learned about those additional fires on Wednesday and issued the suspension, according to the outlet.

A Skip scooter also caught fire at a warehouse in San Francisco in December, according to the San Francisco Examiner.

Filed Under: e-scooter, electric scooter, electric scooters, skip,