Fire
Friday 19th January, 2007 14:33 Comments: 0
I know it's a story around a mobile phone, but it involves a fire and maybe spontaneous combustion, so I don't think it's too geeky to mention.
59-year-old Vallejo resident Luis Picaso had been sleeping in his house on a white plastic lawn chair, when he was rudely awoken by a fire which melted the plastic chair, ignited his "polyester-blend slacks" and nylon soccer jersey and caused "second and third-degree burns across at least half his body".
I have to stop now to ask: "who has white plastic lawn chairs in their house?" and point out that I should be a bit safer in my cotton shirt and denim jeans, sat at a wooden desk, which I believe are a lot less flammable than polyester and nylon (although I do have an old Dell laptop, the battery doesn't last long and the CPU gets very hot, but at least it hasn't gone up in flames).
Following the fire, Nokia engineers flew to Vallejo to test the device. They found that the phone's circuitry was undamaged and the battery still in working order: "When we reinstalled the battery, the phone still booted up. If the battery had malfunctioned or the phone had short-circuited, it wouldn't have worked anymore. And it did, so we could rule out the phone as an ignition source."
Thus leaving spontaneous combustion :) (or perhaps something else, which we'll probably never know about).
59-year-old Vallejo resident Luis Picaso had been sleeping in his house on a white plastic lawn chair, when he was rudely awoken by a fire which melted the plastic chair, ignited his "polyester-blend slacks" and nylon soccer jersey and caused "second and third-degree burns across at least half his body".
I have to stop now to ask: "who has white plastic lawn chairs in their house?" and point out that I should be a bit safer in my cotton shirt and denim jeans, sat at a wooden desk, which I believe are a lot less flammable than polyester and nylon (although I do have an old Dell laptop, the battery doesn't last long and the CPU gets very hot, but at least it hasn't gone up in flames).
Following the fire, Nokia engineers flew to Vallejo to test the device. They found that the phone's circuitry was undamaged and the battery still in working order: "When we reinstalled the battery, the phone still booted up. If the battery had malfunctioned or the phone had short-circuited, it wouldn't have worked anymore. And it did, so we could rule out the phone as an ignition source."
Thus leaving spontaneous combustion :) (or perhaps something else, which we'll probably never know about).