An NHS belief is taking the IT big HP to court docket after an exploding laptop computer brought about tons of of hundreds of kilos of injury in a hospital X-ray lab.
The London North West Healthcare NHS Belief is looking for £687,314 in compensation for broken gear after the pc’s battery cells ruptured in the midst of the evening, inflicting a six-hour hearth that needed to be extinguished by firefighters.
The incident occurred at Ealing Hospital in 2017 and the NHS Belief took motion in opposition to the US firm in August, in response to authorized paperwork.
The HP ProBook 4510 laptop computer was left in a basement workplace when its battery cells have been expelled from its casing and tore at round 2am, inflicting “intensive smoke injury” to the workplace and the X-ray lab above it, in response to the declare.
Tools that was broken past restore included a £410,000 endoscopic X-ray machine, the belief mentioned.
The Excessive Court docket lawsuit states that “the fireplace brought about intensive smoke injury to the basement workplace… and its contents and smoke from the fireplace additionally unfold vertically and entered the X-ray room”.
It claims that the laptop computer was “not constructed in accordance with ideas typically accepted as constituting good engineering observe”. It says the corporate breached electrical gear laws and produced the laptop computer negligently.
The belief is looking for damages associated to the gear, in addition to curiosity funds and prices.
Many electronics producers have confronted hassle with lithium-ion batteries igniting. If the batteries turn into broken they will set off a phenomenon generally known as thermal runaway that results in them overheating and presumably exploding.
HP recalled a number of fashions of laptop computer in 2018 and 2019 due to batteries’ propensity to overheat after quite a lot of incidents, though the mannequin within the hospital was not amongst them.
The electronics big Samsung was thrown into disaster in 2016 when its Galaxy Observe 7 telephone was discovered to have defective batteries, main the corporate to droop gross sales of the machine and several other airways to ban it on flights.
Considerations over lithium-ion batteries have unfold amid the rise of electrical automobiles, resulting in rising funding in expertise similar to solid-state batteries, that are seen as safer.
HP and the London North West Healthcare NHS Belief declined to touch upon ongoing authorized proceedings.
