Blasted out of bed in the night, burned Tuolumne teen fights charger explosion, fire
Tuolumne resident Colton Pingree, 15, said being a firefighter is his dream job. He never dreamed, though, that experience would come at this age or in the way it did, which was more of a nightmare.
The night of Aug. 18, Colton went to sleep with a portable battery stick charging next to him on his bed. He wanted to make sure it would keep his devices powered the next day, the first day of school.
“I woke up to being on my floor about 2:30 in the morning, really confused, with a really sharp pain in my back,” Colton said by phone Sunday morning. He saw a flash of light and looked up to see some of his bedding — a comforter and two pillows — had caught fire.
The charger had exploded with enough force to knock him off the bed. It left much of his shirtless back blackened and blistered with second-degree burns.
Though the pain was great, he ignored it and focused on quickly putting out the small fires. “I had no other choice but to think about that because I have a disabled uncle in the house and I didn’t want the fire to get worse,” Colton said.
He grabbed the fabric with his bare hands to smother the flames. His palms and fingers are “pretty callused,” said the youth, whose life includes lots of outdoor activities like hunting and riding dirt bikes and ATVs. So the only injury to his hands was a small blister on a pinky, he said.
Turned water bottle into a sprayer
With the fabric now just smoldering, “I got lucky that I had a pocket knife next to my bed and a water bottle from when I went to bed.” He poked a hole through the top of the water bottle, sprayed it and “just kind of rolled the fire out with a little bit of water in my hand.”
He was able to keep his cool, Colton said, because of what he’d already learned about fires. “I wasn’t really stressed about it because I knew it wasn’t going to grow so fast,” said the Sonora Union High School student, who said he’s going to take fire science classes as soon as he can.
As for the charging stick itself, it literally blew to pieces, he said. The casing exploded and its melted insides splattered across his room, leaving marks on his walls, his windows, his bedding. His mother, Shari Pingree, shared with The Bee a photo of her son’s burned comforter.
Colton quickly found a small chunk of the battery still burning, and he ran it over to a toilet and dropped it in.
He then alerted his dad, Andrew, who examined his son’s burned back. A Dailymail.com article quotes Andrew as saying Colton’s blistered back “looked like a really bad sunburn, so we didn’t go to the hospital at that point in time. I waited until the following morning and then we took him.”
Colton’s doctor thought what he was looking at was a mix of impact bruising and “not really bad burns,” the teen recalled. So the doctor applied burn cream and gave the family more of it and some gauze.
Later in the day, Colton changed his bandage. When he peeled off the gauze, a layer of skin came with it. “So I was like OK, that’s not a bruise. We were like kind of shocked.”
Wildfire evacuations kept them from immediately getting back to see a doctor, he said, and when they later got a virtual appointment, the doctor couldn’t see the burns well enough on video. “He wanted us to come back in so he could see it, but within that time it was already healed up pretty good, so he just told us to keep putting cream on it and keep it covered.”
Beyond some mild scarring, Colton said he’s recovered.
Mother and son spreading word to protect others
On Facebook, his mother shared photos and an account of what happened to him, as “a big warning for all you parents out there.” She asked people to share the post with family and friends, and it’s now been shared more than 52,000 times.
At teachers’ requests, Colton, too, has shared with classmates what happened to him. He warns not to keep chargers, phones and the like on a bed or sitting on anything that can easily catch fire, like papers.
A November 2018 article on Today.com about the dangers of charging a phone in bed included a Facebook post from the fire department in Newton, New Hampshire. It reads: “Research has revealed that 53% of children/teens charge their phone or tablet either on their bed or under their pillow. This can be extremely dangerous. The heat generated cannot dissipate and the charger will become hotter and hotter. The likely result is that the pillow/bed will catch fire.”
The article also quoted a spokeswoman for the National Fire Protection Association, who warned: “Generally, smartphones should be charged in locations that allow for adequate ventilation so they don’t overheat. Charging them under a pillow, on a bed or on a couch doesn’t allow for this.”
