"It had the potential to be a lot worse, but we were very fortunate," said Lauren Campbell, who says flames started shooting from the back of her laptop computer a few weeks ago.
"We were getting ready to watch a movie in the living room," Campbell said. "I turned on my laptop like I would do any other night, then it made a popping noise and kind of blew up."
Campbell picked up the flaming laptop and ran outside. She saved her home from burning, but not herself.
"At some point either my sock caught on fire, or maybe an ember fell on it," Campbell said.
She ended up with burns on her foot. Turns out her HP Pavilion was on a recall list for the very thing that happened.
"I'm sure she's not alone," said Bedford County Fire Marshal, John Jennings. "There's bound to be some other people that have laptops on the recall list that just have no idea."
Jennings worries laptop fires could happen at other homes, with a much different outcome.
"If this happened when everybody was laying down and asleep at night, you could have had a house fully involved," Jennings said.
Campbell is thankful it didn't come to that. She's leaving what's left of her computer outside, in the trash.
"I'm not bringing it back in this house," said Campbell "Whether it has power running to it or not, I'm not going to take that chance."
Campbell may not be the only person in Bedford County who's been the victim of a laptop fire. A much more serious incident may have happened in November.
Jennings believes a laptop might have started a fire at a home on Oakview Court in Moneta. A man named Walter Pugh died.
Photos from the fire show a melted laptop sitting among the ashes of Pugh's house.
"There's certainly that possibility out there that we could have had a fire, which resulted in a fatality, that could have come from the failure of a laptop computer," Jennings said.
The computer found inside Pugh's house was a "Toshiba" model laptop.
Jennings says there was a recall on Toshiba laptop batteries several years ago. The machine inside Pugh's house was too damaged for investigators to know whether it was involved in any recall.
Fire officials are now warning people with a laptop to register their product with the company it was purchased from. That way you'll be contacted if a recall on your computer is issued.
