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Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Thu 21 Sep 2006 11:10 PM PDT  

LAX Firecracker Had A Sony Battery

mobilized
www.mobilized.com.au

Friday, 22 September 2006

There could be an IBM Thinkpad recall in the wings as news emerges that the IBM ThinkPad that exploded info flames at LAX airport was using a battery supplied by Sony. According to this report, Lenovo (Chinese company which acquired IBM's PC division in 2004) has confirmed that the Thinkpad that caught fire [last weekend] at Los Angeles International airport had a Sony battery. Just last week the company claimed that although it used Sony batteries it did not need to recall its notebook computers because they were "Safe". The news about the latest public laptop explosion came just a week ago, but there are reports of a similar incident at Yahoo's US headquarters this week and the issue just keeps generating interest and concern as users realize these Lithium Ion batteries are potentially dangerous. 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. While it is not unusual for Lithium Ion batteries to do this if they have been damaged in some way, it was a manufacturing design fault which saw shards of metal cross contaminate the explosive materials in the Sony batteries that caused the recent recall by Dell and Apple. [Click for details of Apple's recall & battery exchange program for some models of older Mac G4 laptops.] Manufacturers met this week to try to accelerate plans to develop industry standards for Lithium Ion batteries which could lead to safer laptops through better design and more consistent manufacturing processes. With IBM/Lenovo devices now drawn into the public revelation that laptop batteries are a threat on aircraft, it seems likely that even more restrictions on even more laptop brands are likely to be implemented by airlines.

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Here's the personal story of an eyewitness of the LAX meltdown, along with some dramatic photos: ~ ron

"...So we're waiting for a flight in the United lounge at LAX, the flight next to ours was heading to London and in the middle of final boarding, when suddenly this guy comes running the wrong way up the jetway, pushing other boarding passengers out of the way, he quickly drops his laptop on the floor and the thing immediately flares up like a giant firework for about 15 seconds, then catches fire. About a hundred other people in the lounge jumped up and began a mix of gawking and general panic, I clearly heard a few fleeing individuals saying something about terrorists. The fire burned for a minute while everybody just stared at it, then another flare up, this one much larger than the first, drove a larger group of gawkers away. Eventually, the high intensity flaring calmed down and a larger fire kicked in, all the while letting off a thick cloud of white smoke that was slowly filling the terminal. Finally, an employee came over with a fire extinguisher and put it out of its misery.

I spoke to the laptop owner (while getting close for some pictures!) and he said his laptop was an IBM, that he had checked the battery against the recalls on the net and his battery wasn't a recall. I don't remember seeing any IBM laptops nuke themselves yet on GizModo, just Macbooks and Dells with Sony batteries, but it was a close call nonetheless, if that thing had fired off while that plane was in the air, who knows what would have happened."

Click here to see dramatic photos of torched Thinkpad

(Notice the circular hotspot on the floor where the thing actually burned.)

And no, I wasn't able to get any video, couldn't get to the camera in time...
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And here's a photo of the Dell computer which recently caught fire at Yahoo HQ.

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