NFL star and family survive house fire ‘caused by Tesla charger’ Randall Cobb, along with wife and three sons, ‘lucky to be alive’ after blaze tears through home

telegraph.co.uk ^ | 27 June 2024 | Raoul Simons

[V_TWIN]

NFL star and his family have survived a house fire that was apparently started by a Tesla charger in their garage.

Randall Cobb, 33, escaped from the blaze along with his wife Aiyda and three sons Cade, Caspian and Chance - and even returned to save their pet dog, Louie.

No one from the family was injured but the fire caused extensive damage to the property in Nashville, Tennessee.

“We are lucky to be alive,” said Aiyda Cobb in an Instagram post on Wednesday.

“The Tesla charger caught on fire in the garage late last night and quickly spread. We got out of the house with nothing but the clothes on our back and no shoes on our feet.”

[Moltke]

It was not clear (to me) that you were experiencing hypoxia which lead to diminished hearing. Thanks for the clarification, and I retract my snark.

Good story, here’s my only close one:

I used to have a lot to do with LN2, which we used to cool detectors (GeLi - Lithium-drifted Germanium) and vacuum cooling traps for experiments at our university heavy ion accelerator.

We had a room which had a line to a tap from an outside 50,000 liter LN2 tank for filling 20 liter dewars - our group in the building was not the only one to use LN2, but we used a *lot*.

Anyway, about a year after I left the physics institute for self-employment, one of the young graduate students was found frozen stiff (-196 °C is about as stiff as it gets) in that room one morning.

The ventilation system was good enough, so how that came about remains sketchy to me... Though the whole setup was a bit basic - when the dewar was filled there was no automatic shutoff, it would spill over and form clouds on the floor. You’d think PhD candidates were smart enough to close the tap... Anyway, to close up on the oxygen displacement, if someone wanted to go, nitrogen asphyxiation is a pretty good choice.

[higgmeister]

You cannot call it hypoxia because I had no issues at all with my health.   We just walked into the room, looked around for a moment, made comments to each other about how bizarre it felt on our eardrums for a moment, and walked back into the hallway.

You sure got my attention with your story.   That was horrible.   Was it possible that not being diligent about closing the tap, would the tap freeze open?

[Moltke]

You had previously said “ It was an odd feeling of attenuated sound because oxygen was not reaching my eardrums.”

I’m not a medical doctor but that sounded (no pun intended) like low oxygen in the bloodstream - aka hypoxia. But never mind.

The setup with the LN2 tap was very basic, had been around for many decades. Large tank right outside that room of the building, insulated line through the wall, lever ball valve, downtube ending about 2 feet above the floor so you could stick the end in the dewar (large thermos looking like a milk can). Oh, there was ventilation as well, but just a fan in the wall blowing to the outside. There were always a few inches of dense LN2 fog on the floor when filling the cans. Poor guy had to have his head very low to pass out from nitrogen asphyxiation. How that happened...???

The tap never froze up even when filling a dozen dewars - somethink like 20 to 30 mins constant flow. Freak accident or intentional. Did not hear that anyone got indicted over it.