E-cigarette battery explodes in man’s pocket

Dan Walker, 20, was in a shop when his trousers burst into flames. He quickly tried to pull down his jogging bottoms and shoppers were forced to roll him on the ground to extinguish the fire. Dan was rushed to the specialist burns unit at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham where doctors found he had suffered second and third degree burns. Shocking injury pictures taken at hospital show how his left leg was left completely blackened by the blast.
Dan, a production line worker for Jaguar Land Rover, has now been told he will need a skin graft to repair the damage.  He said: “There was no warning, the battery was not hot or causing any problems.
“As I walked into one of the shops I heard this bang and a whistle like you hear from a firework and my leg had caught fire.
“My left leg was totally covered in fire and my right was singed.
“I could have lost my private parts or even worse. If I’d been vaping at the time it could have taken my face clean off. It’s terrifying to think about what might have been.
“The whole thing just happened so fast and my first thought was to pull down my joggers as fast as I could to escape from the flames.
“At first I thought a bomb had gone off. It was terrifying. Other people in the shop were rolling me on the floor to put out the flames.
 “I can barely walk at the moment but in some ways I do feel lucky because they said if I had been wearing jeans at the time, I would not have been able to get them off quick enough and I could have lost my leg.
 “The pain I felt was something that was out of this world.”