On the face of it, the black 7-inch touchscreen tablet that I found on Monday (June 22) looked invitingly pristine and sleek against the bright red Dumpster where someone had generously left it.
But when I picked it up off of the improvised shelf of the Dumpster’s fork pocket, it was unexpectedly wedge-shaped in my hand—one long side of the back shell was split open and forced away from the screen by some swollen thing in the guts of the device.
The word “Kindle” was embossed into the rubbery surface of the back shell. The tablet appeared to be an Amazon Kindle Fire and the thing inside it, swollen to more than twice its normal thickness, was its thoroughly toasted rechargeable lithium-ion battery.
Either the battery exploded or it overheated to a point just short of exploding—almost certainly as a result of over-charging. In the process, it expanded like a bag of microwave popcorn and forced the case to pop open on one side. Now it looked less like a battery and more like a foil packet of spoiled food, puffy with botulism.
But it was potentially much more dangerous.
bit.ly/2Namexz via @georgiastraight
