SaferProducts incident

Failure type

Fire / ignition

Incident narrative

SaferProducts.gov consumer incident report 20151219-982EF-2147425692. Severity: Incident, No Injury. Product: Toro Toro Rake and Vac model 51585 (Toro Rake and Vac - Model No. 51585). Incident: This report is regarding a Toro leaf blower which caught fire without any human interaction with it for the previous 36 hours. The fire was spontaneous. I had bought this leafblower in September 2014 from Lowe's. The fire occurred on October 13, 2015. So the blower was relatively new. Early on October 12, 2015 I used the blower to clear off my back patio and walkways. They are concrete. As it was Fall with continuing leaves falling, I left the blower plugged in and sitting on its coiled extension cord on the concrete walkway, underneath a nearby redwood tree. Weather was clear and warm for those and following days. About 30 hours later I was away from home when a neighbor called me to tell me that there was "a large fire" underway in my back yard and that I should get there immediately. When I returned, two neighbors had broken the gate to my yard to gain access and had extinguished two fires with a garden hose. One was the blower itself, the other was in the redwood tree above. They were alerted to the fire in my back yard by a pillar of dense, black smoke about 50 feet high. Damaged were the blower, its extension cord, the concrete walkway, the adjoining railroad tie wall and the overhanging redwood tree. The blower was a pile of burned plastic surrounding the metal of the blower motor, with the protruding nozzle not fully burned. The redwood tree had several lower branches wholly burned; the fire had been spreading upward into the tree and its two neighbors before the fire was extinguished. I phoned Toro to report the fire. They were responsive, having a "Senior Paralega