Monday, October 20, 2014
Mr. Lechter’s phone, post-fire. (YouTube)
The iPhone 6’s questionable bendiness — perhaps better known as #Bendgate — might have just become a lot more serious.
A man, Phillip Lechter, claims his iPhone 6 bent and caught fire in his pocket following a minor pedicab accident in Tucson, Ariz., on the weekend of Oct. 11. The flaming gadget, Mr. Lechter attests on his blog, burned through his jeans, and left first- and second-degree burns on his leg.
The harrowing experience began when the pedicab in which Mr. Lechter and his family were riding lost its balance, and tipped over to the left. He says he was jostled to the point of being half-on, half off the rickshaw. After checking to make sure his wife and son were okay, Mr. Lechter noticed something was off about his leg.
“I felt a burning sensation on my leg and then saw and smelled smoke from my pants,” he writes. “I surveyed the rickshaw quickly and could not find anything that could have set me on fire. Then it hit me, my phone was in my pocket.”
Mr. Lechter says he lay down to extract the iPhone from his pocket, and threw it aside. “The smell was disturbing,” he writes. “I could feel my leg burning.”
Proving that humanity isn’t entirely doomed, bystanders came to Mr. Lechter’s assistance. Unfortunately, Mr. Lechter claims one of them was burned, too.
“Someone from a crowd of spectators threw a cup of water on my leg to put the fire out on my jeans,” he writes. “I had a leather Apple case on the phone, and the case was facing forward, and that saved my fingers from getting badly burned when i went to remove the phone from my pocket. A bystander was not so lucky; he picked up the phone without the case and burned his fingers.”
Another bystander poured ice water over the sizzling phone:
