Last June, a man named Hamid Sadeghy was installing a car windshield
in Austin, Texas when he felt a vibration in his pocket. Sadeghy, who owns his own auto-glass
company, is a responsible person who had been trying to cut back on his
cigarette habit for the previous month or so by using electronic cigarettes
(also called e-cigs or vapes).
Suddenly, in Sadeghy's words "It was like a firecracker. It made the same exact noise. A hissing sound and then burning
sensation." An e-cigarette in
his pants pocket had exploded. He
suffered severe burns on his thigh which caused him to have difficulty walking,
and was not able to return to work for three weeks following the accident.
Sadeghy is one of dozens if not hundreds of people who have been
affected by e-cigarette explosions.
Ironically, many people use e-cigarettes for the same reason Sadeghy
did: as a less harmful alternative
to conventional smoking. Although
the jury is still out on the health hazards of e-cigarettes, there may be
something to this idea. But it
changes the picture if every time you light up you're taking a chance that what
you're smoking will turn into a pipe bomb.
The phenomenon of e-cigarettes showed up in the U. S. around 2007, and
a 2015 poll showed that about 10% of U. S. adults now use the product at least
occasionally. Vape shops have sprung up in many places, and most convenience
stores carry them. (Interestingly,
the major tobacco companies dominate the convenience-store market channel.) So if even a few hundred people have
had their e-cigarette blow up on them, it is still a very rare occurrence, on
the order of one incident per year for every 10,000 to 100,000 users.
Still, the tip of the injury iceberg of e-cigarettes is pretty grim,
not to mention the property damage caused by fires. A recent article on Buzzfeed shows graphic photos of Joseph
Cavins, whose exploding e-cigarette destroyed one eye, and Thomas Boes, who
lost three teeth in a disfiguring explosion from the same cause. It's not clear whether such highly
publicized stories are responsible for a recent slowdown in the growth of the
e-cigarette market, but it's certainly possible. It's well known that a few really exotic and gruesome accidents
can cause more popular fear than a much larger number of less chilling mishaps. This is why some people will get in a
car without thinking but refuse to fly under any circumstances, even though the
risk of accidents per mile traveled are much greater in automobiles.
A federal agency called the U. S. Fire Administration (USFA) did a
study in 2014 of accidents and fires caused by e-cigarettes, and found that
about four out of five happened during charging. Most of the units use a universal-type USB connector to
charge the lithium-ion battery that provides the power to heat the vaporizing
element. Unfortunately, this
connector will fit pretty much any USB outlet, including power sources that
were not designed to charge the particular battery that the e-cigarette
uses. The USFA thinks that most of
the fires happened when the user tried to charge their unit with a power source
not designed for it.
Lithium-ion batteries are nasty chemically, even when they are not
enclosed in a cylindrical metal structure that unintentionally forms a pipe
bomb. The electrolyte is
flammable. If such a battery is
charged too fast, it overheats, the liquid electrolyte vaporizes and breaches
the battery case, and the thing catches fire. The fire raises the pressure inside the metal tube of the
e-cigarette, and here's where the pipe-bomb analogy comes in. Small tubes can contain much higher
pressures than other shapes, and so the tube doesn't give out on the sides. Instead, the end cap or caps blow off,
but only after the pressure has built up to an extremely high level. When a cap lets go, the flaming
electrolyte shoots it off with the force of a projectile and sprays itself all
over whatever is nearby. If the
unit's being charged, that may be only things like flammable paper or
wood.
But in the fairly rare cases when the battery fails while in use, this
sequence of dire events can go off in your face, with tragic and disfiguring
results. Properly designed and
manufactured lithium-ion batteries don't explode spontaneously as they are
charged or discharged, but the technology is being pushed pretty hard even when
an e-cigarette operates normally.
A current of an amp or more is needed to heat the vaporizing element,
and some counterfeit or shoddily made batteries can't handle that reliably and
end up with an internal short due to overheating. The result is pretty much the same as with overcharging: electrolyte vaporizing and an
explosion.
The Buzzfeed report says that the U. S. Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) is moving to regulate e-cigarettes, bringing them under the same
regulatory umbrella as conventional tobacco products. Their plan is to require sellers to apply for authorization
to sell the units, with approval hinging on safety features such as
overcharging protection circuitry.
Of course, this would make the units cost more, but the present
situation that makes it easy to connect an e-cigarette to the wrong charger is
clearly a bad one.
Fire has a way of showing up in the early stages of many electrical products. For a few years I worked at a division
of Motorola which made two-way radios for first responders, and learned
something about the history of the company, which goes back to the early days
of radios installed in automobiles around 1930. Back then it seems that the company rushed some auto radios
into production that were not sufficiently safety-tested, and the resulting
burned-up cars nearly killed Motorola.
Fortunately, they figured out what was wrong and fixed it, and car
radios became one of the company's mainstays for many years.
The vaping industry needs to clean up its safety act by changing the
charging method so consumers can't accidentally make little time bombs by
plugging an e-cigarette into the wrong charger. This will require coordination among the dozens of largely
Chinese e-cigarette makers that up to now are probably engaged in cut-throat
competition, and may not happen unless the FDA imposes the requirement on
them. So it will be interesting to
see what happens in that regard.
In the meantime, if you happen to be a vape-er (?), be sure to use only
the charger that came with the unit.
And it might not be a bad idea to wear safety glasses while you smoke.
Sources: I thank my wife for pointing out to me
the article on Buzzfeed from which I learned of this problem, posted on May 26,
2016 at
-->https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/burned?utm_term=.tbvvL7kEL#.mr0E63qy6. I also referred to a vaping website
called IEC where an (admittedly unscientific) survey of thirty e-cigarette
accidents is reported at http://info-electronic-cigarette.com/e-cigarette-explosions-an-in-depth-investigation/. This site refers to the USFA study,
which is available at https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/publications/electronic_cigarettes.pdf. Mr. Sadegh's story was reported by Fox
News on June 30, 2015 at http://www.fox7austin.com/news/4664501-story,
and the statistic that about 10% of U. S. adults use e-cigarettes is from http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-ecigarette-poll-analysis-idUSKBN0OQ0CA20150610.Note added July 18, 2016: A reader named Jason Artman read the above post and brought my attention to his website http://ecigone.com/featured/e-cigarette-explosions-comprehensive-list/, where he is maintaining a comprehensive list of over 100 e-cigarette explosion incidents.
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