A shopper in Anaheim, California, was burned when his e-cigarette exploded in his pants pocket—and the incident was caught on videotape.
Mohamad Zayid Abdihdy, 24, was examining televisions at the HDTV Outlet store in Anaheim, when he felt something odd in his front pants pocket.
His e-cigarette first shocked him, then exploded into sparks and flame.
Agdihdy yanked the flaming device out of his pocket, dropped it to the floor, and sprinted for the store’s restroom to attend to his burns.
Store Manager Antelmolare Guzman had been assisting Abdihdy. When the customer had chosen one model, Guzman went to the front desk to write up the paperwork.
He was partway through the process when he heard an explosion.
“We turn around and all we see is smoke and something caught on fire,” Guzman explained.
“The gentleman, he is running out to the front of the office, and he is screaming and yelling. Apparently, all of his right leg was completely burned all the way down. Part of his private parts were also kind of affected with the whole fire thing.”
While Abdihdy tried to treat his scorched flesh, Guzman rushed to the back of the store to extinguish the still-burning vaping device.
“It was really scary, the explosion and the fire and with all the parts that we have—we have boxes,” Guzman said. “The area that we’re in is an industrial area, so it could have easily caught fire.”
He told NBC that the air in the back of the store smellled of “burnt skin.”
Mohamad Abdihdy was painfully burned, but decided not to go to a hospital. Instead, he drove himself home, and sent his cousin to the pharmacy for some topical burn treatments.
Abdihdy, who works in a cellphone store, described the effect of his injuries: “I can’t walk on my leg, honestly. That’s how much I’m in pain.”
Abdihdy also said he was done with “vaping,” or smoking e-cigarettes. ““I’m going back to hookah,” he stated.
Electrical Fires, Battery Explosions
This is not the first reported case of a vaping device exploding.The explosion sent pen parts into his brain, and also set his house on fire. The Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner’s report showed that the broken bits, blasted into his head by the explosion, caused, D’Elia’s death.
“The battery caught fire, and the bag started smoking real quick,” said Transportation Security Administration Regional spokesman Mark Howell.
“The battery blew out—it was almost like a shotgun,” said Kenneth Barbero Jr. “It blew out and the vape went into my mouth.”
The clerk accidentally attached the wrong battery.
“The guy was showing me different products of the vaporizers,” said eighth-grader Leor Domatov.
“While he was showing me, he connected one of the vaporizers to the battery of the store. He gave it to me to hold and when I was holding it, it exploded in my hands and my face.”
Besides burning his hands, the explosion injured Domatov’s eyes.
“In my left eye, I have a cut through the cornea and I can’t see out of it, and on my right eye, the cornea was cut halfway through and I can see a little bit,” he explained.
In New York one must be 21 to buy or handle e-cigarettes, so the shop was violating the law by letting Domatov use the device.
Of course, the same accident could have happened to any customer regardless of age.
The senator cited an Associated Press article, which said the FDA identified about 66 explosions in 2015 and early 2016 after recording 92 explosions from 2009 to September 2015.
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