Samsung's Exploding Note 7 Battery Facility Just Caught Fire
You can't make this stuff up.
It doesn’t matter what started the fire at a Chinese battery factory that supplied a large portion of Samsung’s exploding Galaxy Note 7 batteries — the people have already decided for themselves.
Battery manufacturer Samsung SDI, the company that manufactured the dangerously inflammable batteries for the Galaxy Note 7, experienced a “minor fire” at its associated waste disposal facility. The video below shows smoke rising from the fire, which certainly looks larger than “minor,” and required a total of 19 fire engines and more than 110 firefighters to put out. Reports indicate they quickly got the fire under control.
According to summaries of Chinese-language reporting, the blaze caught among the lithium-ion batteries that cost Samsung billions just a few months ago. This has led the public to draw the obvious association, but it’s technically not yet known just what caused the fire among the battery components.
Remember: it’s possible someone just threw a cigarette butt, or something.
Still, since nobody was seriously injured in this fire, social media has decided that the whole situation is very funny, and that the cause was definitely a battery fire. Coming from a company that just invested the equivalent of $130 million in safety to help shore up a rather singed public image, that was just too ironic for the internet to pass up.
Samsung SDI is a subsidiary of Samsung proper, so the assumption has been that its batteries will continue to go into Samsung phones despite the recall. If headlines like this keep piling up, however, the beleaguered phone giant may find it has to jettison its faithful battery maker. Remember that Samsung SDI was just one of two companies that supplied defective Note 7 batteries, so there’s always a second defective battery company to save the day.
