Consumer News And Recalls

(CBS) Nick Brown, 11, was playing on his Apple iBook laptop about one month ago when, like most children, he got distracted and left the room.

His mom, Cindy Brown, explains what happened next. "My husband and I were in the other room, heard a popping noise, came out and the room was filled with smoke," she said.

Heat from the laptop, which was lying on the floor, had started melting the carpet. The Browns quickly carried it outside.

Dave Brown grabbed his camera. His pictures show flames shooting from the lower right hand corner of the laptop. The area around the lower right side is blackened immediately.

More pictures show the laptop continuing to burn, eventually causing large flames to shoot out of it. Eventually, the laptop is melted to the Browns' patio.

"I mean, it was five minutes and (the computer) was in flames," Cindy Brown said. "The computer burst into flames. It doesn't seem real that you would have a fire in a computer. We all could have died, and the house could have burned down."

In fact, some of Brown's concerns have been realized.

According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a fire that burned a two-story apartment complex in Mississippi in November 2005 was caused by a laptop.

In 2004, the Commission received a report of a laptop fire in a kindergarten room in Houston. The same year, a laptop fire severely burned a woman in her dorm in New York.

Reports show a hotel bed ignited and caused a room to catch fire in Warren, Mich. in November 2005. In March, a laptop in a laboratory caught fire and burned the desk where it was located in Ames, Iowa.

These incidents are among the 43 reported incidents in the last two years. Nick Brown's computer makes 44.

Staring at his computer and shaking his head, Nick Brown said, "I don't know why it caught fire."

In 2004 and 2005, Apple, Dell and Hewlett Packard collectively recalled more than 300,000 laptop batteries "due to fire hazards."

"The vast influx of these devices into the home and into the office creates the opportunity for a very large problem," security consultant Scott Rynd said.

Rynd is one of many industry insiders who say the problem focuses on lithium ion batteries.

As computers get smaller, so do the lithium ion batteries. Rynd says the batteries are getting over-packed with power and overheating.

Rynd and other insiders say the demand for laptops is also increasing as the prices go down, so the big computer companies are now buying batteries overseas.

As American computer makers are left to recall the imported batteries, two questions remain:

1) Are they acting quickly enough?

"(Computer companies) are not actively covering up the issues," Rynd said. "They are not taking out full-page ads in the New York times to publicize the problem."

2) Are the computer makers recalling enough?

The battery in the Brown's computer is not on Apple's recall list -- at least, not yet.

"This could happen again to someone else," Cindy Brown said. "Had we not been in the room, our house would have started on fire. I mean, we could have been asleep. It's just very frightening to think what could have happened."

The Browns' case is now under investigation by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Dell and Apple gave us a "no comment" for this story. Hewlett Packard did not return our calls.

Patti Davis, a spokesperson with the Consumer Product Safety Commission, said the agency is following the situation.

Davis said there have been a lot of recalls. She said lithium ion batteries do have a lot of energy and can potentially cause injury.

The agency recommends paying close attention to computer company manuals.

Computers are not the only devices that use lithium ion batteries. Several other small portable devices, such as cell phones, also use the technology. They too have been part of recalls due to fire hazards.

(© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)