E-Cigarette Explodes While Being Charged with an iPad Charger
Electronic cigarette explosions are very rare, but it seems like whenever they occur the media is all over them, warning readers about the dangers posed by e-cigarettes while failing to disclose crucial details of the events.
The latest case in point is this exploding e-cigarette incident that took place two weeks ago in Richmond, United Kingdom. According to a York Press report, 18-year-old bartender Laura Baty was serving a customer when her co-workers e-cigarette, which was charging behind the bar, suddenly exploded and shot into the air, burning her dress and injuring a patron. “I could see the fire coming at me and I felt the heat as I ran away,” Baty told reporters. “I started crying hysterically and my arm was all black. My dress caught on fire as I ran away and I just didn’t know what was happening.”
Exploding electronic cigarettes are no joke, and being around one when it bursts into flames must truly be a scary experience, but that’s exactly why you should follow the instructions of use to the letter to avoid such incidents. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the owner of this particular e-cigarette failed to do, although many otherwise prestigious news outlets failed to report this very important detail. 21-year-old Stewart Patterson was charging the e-cig battery using his iPad charger, as he had done “countless times before”. Only this time was different, the device exploded.
Every decent electronic cigarette sold on the market today comes with a series of instructions and warnings, one of which is never to charge the batteries with chargers other than the ones provided by the manufacturer. Although Patterson clearly ignored this warning, he is convinced the incident was caused by a battery fault. “I’ve been using e-cigarettes since Christmas and I can really feel the difference since giving up normal cigs. I will carry on using them but not from this company (Totally Wicked),” he told the Daily Mail. “You just don’t expect something like that to happen from such a reputable brand and I definitely won’t be using them again.”
While e-cigarette explosions have been reported in the past, they are very rare and usually occur when the devices are improperly charged, left unattended for long periods of time, or are fitted with dangerous stacked batteries. As industry spokesman Thomas Kiklas states, “when you charge them, they are 99.9 percent safe, but occasionally there will be failures.” The same can be said about any electronic device out there, but you don’t see the press covering every TV or mobile phone when they malfunction. Now, why is that?
