KIRO 7 broke the news worldwide that U.S. federal investigators have been looking into the safety of iPods for years.

Now, we're learning about even more incidents of iPods suddenly smoking and burning that even federal investigators don't know about.

According to documents obtained by Consumer Investigator Amy Clancy, the Tacoma Fire Department was called to an apartment on Division Avenue in June of 2008, because the renters reported the smell of what they thought was natural gas.

When firefighters arrived, they found a melted iPod Nano.

“It was obvious it had burned,” says Rebecca Bracewell, who rented the apartment.

Bracewell tells Clancy she felt embarrassed for calling 911 after learning her iPod was the cause, but says the responding firefighters told her she did the right thing.

Bracewell says, “I apologized for bringing them out because obviously my apartment wasn’t on fire. It wasn’t the stove. And he said, 'No. This is what catches peoples’ houses on fire. This could have caught your house on fire.'”

The responding firefighters wrote in their report the iPod had “overheated and burned.”

Lee Askern of Surprise, Arizona, also worried his house could have burned down, saying “I think I could have come back to a house fire.”

Back in 2006, Askern was one of the first to report to federal investigators that his iPod had suddenly melted while charging through his laptop computer. He filed a complaint with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission because he didn't feel Apple was taking his claims seriously.

“Their response was along the line of, 'send us a check for $34 for shipping and handling and we’ll replace it.' And I said, 'You know? My house could have burned down,'" Askern says he told an Apple customer service representative.

Askern's complaint was one of at least 15 investigated by the CPSC in the past few years. KIRO 7 learned of these incidents after filing a Freedom of Information Act records request which resulted in more than 800 pages of documents included in the Consumer Product Safety Commission's investigation into iPods.

KIRO 7 filed the request after Jamie Balderas of Arlington told Clancy last November her story of a burn she blames on her iPod Shuffle.

“My skin started really burning bad, like it was a bee sting that wouldn’t stop,” Balderas told Clancy, pointing to a scab on her chest.

Shortly after hearing Balderas' claims in the KIRO 7 report, Katherine Miller of Tacoma contacted Consumer Investigators to say the same thing happened with her iPod Shuffle in May, and she showed a scar on her chest she blames on an iPod burn.

“When I saw the pictures of the burn on her chest, it looked exactly like what happened to me. It was identical in the way it looked. Mine was a little bit bigger, but it was identical, and I couldn’t believe it.” Neither Miller nor Bracewell filed complaints with the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Nor did any of the nine other people who contacted KIRO 7 to say they'd experienced similar overheating problems with their iPods.

Apple won't say how many complaints in total it has received but claims "the number of confirmed incidents of batteries overheating is less than 0:0001 percent of all iPods sold, which is an incredibly small percentage and none of those incidents caused serious injury or property damage."

KIRO 7 has always reported that the overheating incidents are very rare. But as the additional complaints we've received show, they may not be as rare as both the CPSC and Apple claim.

Rebecca Bracewell says it doesn't really matter how uncommon these overheating incidents are.

“It’s rare until it happens in your apartment, you know? It’s not a concern until it’s your apartment that could have burned down.”

Bracewell, Miller and Askern all believe a warning should be on iPod packaging that simply informs consumers that the devices’ lithium ion batteries could overheat.

KIRO 7 Consumer Investigators have filed a new public records request to see whether Apple is complying with an order from the federal government that states the California-based company must report any new incidents of iPods overheating to the CPSC.

If you'd like to see all the questions KIRO 7 Consumer Investigators have submitted to Apple over the past year, click here.

For Apple’s entire statement, click here.