Spontaneous combustion: Exploding Samsung phone could have destroyed Garner home

She says the danger is something you have in your home – maybe even in your pocket right now.

The fire caused by her Samsung cell phone randomly exploding on her countertop was bad enough that a nearby fire department responded.

Sarah, who did not want to share her last name, says there was no warning anything was wrong with her phone before it went up in smoke.

"This must be the battery," she says. "Burnt to a crisp."

Sarah says she's fortunate her home wasn't burnt to a crisp as well. She arrived home on Wednesday and was surprised to see a lot of smoke.

"There was smoke, there was little flares coming up, and it started busting out in huge flames," she says.

Scorch marks are still visible on her counter where the phone had been sitting when it exploded.

"That got really hot," she says. "It probably went like boom, like sizzled.”

She grabbed the phone and threw it out the door of her home -- where it left burn marks on the deck outside.

A doorbell camera caught firefighters arriving. They placed fans to clear out the smoke.

"The firefighter came in the house and looked and said, 'You are lucky you did not lose your house,'" she says.

Fire investigators say the captain on scene believed the fire was caused by a malfunctioning device.

Sarah’s phone is a Samsung. She says it did not get hot or show any obvious signs of danger – but lines had started to appear on the screen.

"But nothing major to tell you something was wrong with the phone," she says.

WRAL News reached out to Samsung for a comment, In a statement, the company said: Samsung stands behind the quality and safety of the mobile devices in use in the U.S.

They say they have reached out to Sarah to retrieve the device and learn more about the specifics behind this experience.

Sarah says the phone was not plugged in at the time of the fire. Fortunately she was not seriously injured.

Back in 2016, fires in the Samsung Note 7 led to the largest phone recall in history, when about 2.5 million devices were recalled around the world.

An investigation found the phone's casing was too small for the batteries, causing them to short-circuit and overheat.

Samsung later formed a battery advisory group and changed quality controls to prevent it from happening again.