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Right here at the top, let me be clear. Commercial aviation is safe, incredibly safe. The most dangerous thing on your next flight might be sitting in your carry-on bag. Your battery charger. Here's why. The FAA says lithium ion battery fires on aircraft happen more than you think. 97 reported last year alone. That's nearly two every single week and twice the number from 2024. Every fire traced back to an Android, iPhone, iPad, laptop, or chargers. Any fire at 35,000 feet is serious. Southwest Airlines is the first carrier to take real action. In 10 days, every Southwest passenger gets one charger. That's it. And it cannot go ever into check bags. Period. Every other airline should be taking their lead right now. Sign up for my free newsletter at getkim.com. Next up, a call from my weekend show, the Kim Commando show. Enjoy. Think about all the irreplaceable moments on your computer, your kids' photos, important records, years of work, and memories. 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I'm so excited to have you here. I am so excited to be a part of this. I suppose this is going to be a lot of fun. So, all right. So, you're the guy who has the dog Colton, who was chewing on some type of lithium ion device. Do you remember the sound? Oh, yeah. And then it went on fire. What was it that Colton was chewing on? It was a portable, like a portable cell phone charger, something you'd carry on vacation, where you're going to be away from a plug for a while, or you don't have an adapter, and you're taking a lot of photos or videos, and you want to charge your phone. It was just one of those. My wife and I had one each from when we would do traveling, and he, I guess, did a little counter surfing. He's a very anxious COVID puppy. He spent the first few years of his life living every day with my wife at home, because she was working from home. And then she went back to work. So, we were dealing with some anxiety issues. So, now I've seen the video, and it's aimed in the middle of your living room. How did you know to check the cameras? Did you see it live, or was it later when you saw your floor? Was your rug was on fire? It was later, but so the specific video that I was able to capture, so we have Simply Safe, and we were coming back from a family event, and the notification came through that there was a fire alarm, and I'm like, okay, well, sometimes those are false. I mean, I've been a firefighter for a while, and I know that a lot of times they are false, but then it immediately rang from the call center number, and they said, hey, we're receiving a fire alarm from your home. We can check the cameras, and I said, yeah, let's do that. And they said, well, we actually see that there's a fire in your living room, so we're going to transfer that to the fire department, to the 911 center, and my heart just sank. I'm on the speakerphone in the car, so my wife and my kids hear this too. Thankfully, close to home, but that's like, okay, so we know something's actually going on, and I can't imagine what it possibly is. And then as we got home, nothing appeared to be causing any issues. There's no smoke coming out of anywhere. We get the house open, and it is pretty full of smoke at that point. I mean, try to get the animals out, and I finished putting out what thankfully due to the fire-retardant materials of the rug that I call a fire. That was good. That was so smart. It was just like feet away from the couch. As I'm watching that video, I'm like, that couch is about to go up in flames. I have to tell you, when I saw it, I was thinking, oh my gosh, this whole house is going to go. This is just, it's going to be so sad. But then the fire dissipated. I was like, wait, whoa, okay. When we sent that video out, we got more comments, I think, on, hey, what kind of rug was that? Then like, oh, thank goodness everybody's okay or anything like that. So as a fireman, what do you, was it thermal runaway that happened on that battery? Yeah, absolutely. So he got a hold of it. We crate him 90, well, we crate him all the time now, and he's not allowed to play with any electronic. He took away his Apple Watch too, right? Oh yeah, 100%. Yeah, LiDAR's matches and anything with a battery in it. So he had, was having just pulling stuff off of the counter, found out later that one of the cats was actually helping him. And he had the cat. The cat was, how was the cat helping him? He was swiping stuff off the counter. They were working together. They were working together. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. They were working together. And so he had chewed a few items. One of the really lucky things there is that he doesn't, when he normally chews anything like his toys, his bones, anything like that, he does it on the staircase that you see him run to. And if it had been there, the outcome would have been completely different. Wow. But the fact that he did it where it was, and essentially, he broke the protective coating of that lithium ion batteries protection, allowed air to get to it. And you see it off gas immediately, and it just goes right into thermal runaway. And the flame and explosion level, that's the level of heat and speed with which the lithium ion batteries ignite How did you put the fire out? Because you're not supposed to put water on it, right? Yeah. Well, you can, and that is really your only best chance from the firefighter standpoint of things. As long as you can confirm that it's truly energized, and that's just a standard firefighter thing. But it burned all of its fuel. Really small battery, burned everything. The lithium ion portions of the battery had burned through. So really, I just poured a picture of water on the rug and started looking to try to figure out what it was, because I had no idea. I had not looked at the video at the time and had no idea what it was. The bigger the battery, the bigger the fire, the more the water. So I'm just curious, when they dispatched to the nearest station, was that your station? It was not. I lived in a slightly different community, but I know a lot of the guys and gals that work there. So folks showed up immediately, just knowing the address. Are the authorities considering charging your dog with arson? No, I think that they felt like he learned his lesson. Okay, good. So the takeaway from this, David, is what? The best part, and it actually happened in Father's Day of 24. And we shared that within our my agency in talking about these, because it's an emerging technology. And these are issues that firefighters are having to learn more and more about. It's not brand new, but the level with which the amount, the volume of which lithium ion batteries are in the market has just, you know, it's exponential. So we had shared that out. The National Fire Protection Association's theme for fire safety, fire prevention month this year is charged into fire safety. So me and my fire chief were like, hey, he said, do you mind if we share that out? I said, absolutely not. Like this is the best case scenario to explain and get people's attention. It is. And also know that the outcome wasn't a complete loss of a home or any injury or anything to any of the pets or anything like that. So we were able to say like, look, this is the danger that you don't even realize is in your home. But here are some steps that you can take and learn from my sweet boy Colton's bad choice. Don't put it on the counter with the cat. They're going to work together. But no, it is a serious problem. It is. And it's not just with, you know, these batteries. It's also what with e-bikes and Teslas and everything else that goes down the line. Yeah. And that's part of the really the education portion and the context of understanding these emerging technologies. There are safety things that come along with, I mean, just like we had to with internal combustion engines and everything else is, as things became more refined and we've figured out how the failure points were that were, you know, causing injuries and deaths, then we're able to adjust and overcome. All of this has just occurred so quickly that it's hard to stay on top of it. It is. A good friend of mine, David, is the fire chief in Santa Barbara County. And we've, and he's also teaching me how to sail too, by the way. So as we're sailing around, he's, we're talking, this is what we talk about. I'm like, how do you guys put the Tesla fire out? He's like, okay, Kim, let me tell you. No, it's serious stuff and it is called the Thermo Runway. And that's, but you know, the rug, wow, makes you really want to make sure that you have flame retardant rugs, doesn't it? I didn't even think of that thing to have. I just buy the cheapest one on Amazon. Well, now you know. Now you know. David, thank you so much for coming on the air with us today.
