With the recent news of hoverboards catching on fire randomly, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the university made the decision to ban the devices on campus.
“There is no middle ground with this… it’s really a personal safety issue,” said Dr. Tim Pierson, vice president of Student Affairs.
The source of these random fires have been concluded to be an issue with the battery and charging. The issue with students charging their hoverboards is that most convenient place to charge them would be in their rooms. This poses an incredibly high risk of a fire in a residence.
Pierson expressed how having “a fire in a residence is one of the scariest, most dangerous things.”
There have been issues found with the hoverboards’ lithium-ion batteries which contain a flammable electrolyte. According to the National Public Radio (NPR), this electrolyte causes the hoverboards to overheat while charging.
“I think a lot of them are using second-tier battery sources which are going to have probably a higher rate of defects,” Jay Whitacre, a Professor of Materials Science & Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University told NPR, “These things have more lithium-ion batteries in them than most things because they're used to move you around. It takes more batteries to get you the power energy to do that, and as such there's just more energy in a small space, and so if something does go wrong, it's a bit more catastrophic.”
Cheaper models of hoverboards have been found to have more occurrences of the fires.
Some of the top retailers such as Walmart and eBay, as well as Amazon, market these devices between $200 and $400 depending on the quality of the hoverboards.
Some hoverboards even reach the price of $2,000.
“(The decision) came down to the cheap ones,” said Pierson.
If a student is found in possession of a hoverboard on campus, it would “depend on the situation in terms of failure to comply,” said Pierson.
Pierson also stated that there was “plenty of room to take action and not disciplinary action.”
The ban does not restrict only to riding the devices, but also the possession of them, even if they aren’t in use.
The bottom line of the matter, Pierson insisted, was that “(the) consequence would depend on endangering the health and safety of someone else by bringing it into a residence hall.”
Pierson felt the need to act on this very quickly as many other universities across the nation were already taking action, including those in the Commonwealth such as the College of William & Mary, George Mason University, James Madison University and the University of Virginia.
Bans have reached beyond college campuses with the news of several airlines such as JetBlue, Delta Air Lines and British Airways, which have banned the hoverboards based on their fire hazard. Some metro systems and even the U.S. Postal Service have banned hoverboards.
According to CNN, hoverboards are illegal in the United Kingdom and have been banned in New York City.
Experts have stated that owners of hoverboards should be sure to use the charger which the hoverboard came with and avoid overcharging the battery.
