SEATTLE -- An investigation by KIRO 7 Consumer Investigator Amy Clancy has triggered a recall of 162-thousand bathrobes because a federal agency says, they’re burn hazards.

Earlier this year, Clancy interviewed a Tenino woman who caught on fire while wearing a cotton chenille bathrobe. Within days after Clancy’s story aired, an investigator with the Consumer Product Safety Commission interviewed the same woman. Now, the CPSC says consumers should stop wearing the bathrobes immediately.

“Flame all the way up,” Patti Bingham told Clancy, while gesturing up her right arm. “Kind went into shock and I said fire! Fire!” Bingham was reaching down to pick up her dropped cigarette lighter at the time when flames shot up the arm of her 100-percent cotton chenille bathrobe. "Didn’t feel it at all until it burned here,” Bingham said, pointing to her neck.

Her husband, Cody Bingham, remembers looking at her and seeing “her whole arm was engulfed.”

Fortunately, Cody Bingham was able to knock out the flames, but what happened worried the Tenino couple so much, they called KIRO 7 Consumer Investigators. “I want people to be made aware of how dangerous this item is,” Cody Bingham said when Clancy visited their home. “Somebody’s going to die, or be extremely disfigured.”

Clancy's original story reported that two other women were burned, one seriously, while wearing similar bathrobes, sold by the Blair company out of Warren, Pennsylvania and made in Pakistan.

After the KIRO 7 Consumer Investigation, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and Blair launched investigations of their own. On April 24, 2009, the CPSC revealed that, after Blair re-tested the robes some, quote: "fail to meet federal flammability requirements and present a risk of serious burns to consumers if they are exposed to an open flame." The CPSC warns consumers to stop wearing the robes immediately and return them to Blair for a full refund.

Blair company spokesman, Jude Dippold, told Clancy, the voluntary recall was issued because “we owed that to our customers.”

For more information on which bathrobes are being recalled, and how to get a refund, see the CPSC release.

Blair Company statement: courtesy Jude Dippold, spokesman:
"The recall announced today is a direct result of the incident which KIRO TV and Mrs. Bingham brought to our attention. Even though we had passing flammability tests from accredited overseas labs for each lot of the chenille robes which we imported, concern for our customers prompted us to have robes from our current stock tested at domestic laboratories. When those tests showed that a number of the robes failed to meet federal flammability standards, we immediately contacted the Consumer Product Safety Commission, shared the test results, and entered into a voluntary recall. We owed that to our customers."