A cyclist in Australia was left in absolute agony after his iPhone 6 exploded in his pocket following a fall.
Gareth Clear took a minor tumble while mountain biking through the Manly Dam reserve near Sydney on Sunday afternoon.
But although the fall wasn’t serious, he says the force of the impact with the ground caused his device’s battery to blow up — causing third degree burns on his thigh, which required a skin graft, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.
“I suddenly saw this incredible plume of smoke,” said Clear, who likened the “surging pain” to someone pushing a huge block of ice against his leg. “It was pretty freaking painful,” the 36-year-old management consultant, who moved to nearby Bondi from England six years ago, added.
After burning his fingers while trying to peel the smoldering gadget from his leg, Clear managed to knock it off using his fist.
Fearing chemicals from his iPhone’s lithium-ion battery would seep into his bloodstream, he tried cleaning his wound with water from his sports bottle before pushing his bike back down the trail for more than one mile.
Clear made it to the nearby Manly General Hospital, and from there was transferred to the specialist Royal North Shore Burns Hospital for the skin graft. He’ll continue receiving treatment until at least Friday, when he hopes he’ll be discharged with a care plan.
He posted a graphic photograph of his wound to Twitter, in which he tagged the iPhone’s manufacturer Apple, on Sunday. But he said the response from the California-based tech company had so far been “underwhelming.”
“No one’s asked me how are you? How’s your body? How’s the hole in your leg that’s just exploded, how’s that?” he told 9News. “It was a very technical-driven response, which surprised me. But look, I bear no grudges against Apple.”
Clear did, however, urge Apple to issue a statement over whether a similar incident could happen again. “I just don’t want the circumstances to be worse for someone else,” he added.
The Huffington Post has reached out to Apple for comment. One in every 10 million lithium-ion batteries can “fail,” Battery Safety Consulting’s Dan Doughty told CNet. In November 2011, two iPhone 4s exploded — one in Brazil and one on board an Australian airliner.