A Whirlpool refrigerator exploded inside a house in Florida over the weekend, causing significant damage to multiple rooms.
Mark Ligondie said that he was sleeping when he heard a bang, prompting him to sprint from his bedroom to the kitchen.
“The fridge exploded and if you look at this angle right here it expanded and expanded so much it bent the metal of the stove,” he said. “It’s surreal.”
The Whirpool refrigerator was only four months old.
The explosion sent pieces throughout the kitchen and surrounding rooms, leaving cracks in the ceiling and walls. Luckily, nobody was injured.
Ligondie’s next door neighbor, Joshua Perez, rushed over to help after hearing the explosion and smoke alarm, saying the incident prompted him to schedule an appointment to check his own fridge.
“For them to say we’ve never seen this, this is something we have never seen in our life is kind of alarming,” he said.
In a statement, Whirlpool said it was investigating the explosion.
Another Florida Explosion
A Whirlpool fridge was reported to have exploded in the village of Fernandina in Florida in 2015.“I am not the expert,” said Kristine Sherman, Whirlpool’s senior manager of global media and public relations.
She added, “We take this report very seriously and wish to look into the situation.”
Exploding Washing Machines
While there have been few reports of fridges exploding, there have been a number of reports of Whirlpool washers that exploded inside various houses.“The concrete is ballast to hold the machine down in the spin cycle,” one expert said. “Otherwise it would walk around the room.”
One man said that his washer died in the same manner. “The counterweight used to balance the drum came off, and the machine essentially beat itself to death,” he said.
Steve Wojs, owner of the Adam the Answerman appliance parts store, said that it appeared that the balancing weights broke loose from the outer tub. “Once you lose the weight, the outer tub flies all around and shakes violently,” he said.