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IBM Laptop Explodes At LAX |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Monday, 18 September 2006 |
Okay one public laptop explosion does not make a case for a
recall, but just in case these turn out to be more frequent, IBM is the latest
laptop maker to bear the brunt of a very public lithium ion battery meltdown.
According to a reader report on Gizmodo
an IBM laptop burst into flames as its owner was just boarding a flight from Los Angeles to London.
It's not made absolutely clear this is an IBM laptop not a
Lenovo ThinkPad, but for our purposes we are assuming it is an older IBM
laptop, which spontaneously combusts in a shower of sparks and flames.
Lithium Ion batteries are potentially lethal devices which
if damaged (or poorly manufactured) can cause a short circuit which generates
enough heat to combust the chemicals inside the casing.
It sound really quite spectacular, but could be extremely dangerous
mid-flight. Qantas, Korean Air and Virgin Atlantic have all recently
implemented restrictions on the use of some laptop batteries on boar aircraft after
notebook makers Dell and Apple have issued massive recalls for over 6 million
laptop which have potentially explosive batteries manufactured by Sony.
In this latest incident, the blogger relates how a man came
running up the wrong way out of the air-bridge throws his laptop on the ground
and then watches at if does a fireworks impression on the carpet filling the
terminal with white smoke until an employee finally gets an extinguisher to "put
it out of its misery".
It's not that unusual for lithium ion batteries to do this
if they have been damaged, but since a manufacturing fault which saw shards of
metal cross contaminate the explosive materials in the Sony batteries recalled
by Dell and Apple, public awareness has been heightened.
We're predicting the days of working on your laptop between New York and London
are severely limited.
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