Warehouse faults do happen and when they do, they can sometimes have catastrophic consequences.
Earlier this month a huge fire broke out at one of the Ocado warehouses in Andover, Hampshire. This particular plant one of Ocado’s four automated warehouses they have built over the last 19 years.
The development of these automated warehouses has helped the company win some major partnership deals, including Kroger, a US superstore and Groupe Casino of France. The first two automated warehouses developed require humans to load crates on miles of conveyor belts, the Andover plant had around 1,100 cubic swarm robots which collect groceries from crates and deliver them to a packing station at around 4 metres per second, completing more than 4,000 customer orders per day.
The incident is reported to cost Ocado thousands, it has also been reported that the fire will affect their revenue over the foreseeable future, it is likely to include a dip in share prices. The only positive to take away is that because it was a fully automated warehouse there is no loss of life – all buildings in the local vicinity were evacuated and risk to life was minimal with a few firemen treated for smoke inhalation.
Protecting any building from fire is difficult enough but stopping a fire in a warehouse of this size is almost impossible – there are high volumes of flammable materials which means fires take hold and spread quickly, leaving firefighters to take on huge burning buildings, even when a sprinkler system has been deployed.
“Automated warehousing facilities present significant fire protection challenges as a result of very high storage densities, limited access, electronic conveyancing systems, high racking, and cold storage requirements” said Dr James L D Glockling, technical director at the Fire Protection Association.
Currently, there is no report identifying how the fire began and everything currently being reported is speculative.
For any business, especially a business with a warehouse operation, ensuring your warehouse is fully protected from a fire incident is critical – ultimately a destroyed warehouse could be the end of a business. Ocado is a huge operation but if this had been a smaller business it could potentially have put them out of business.
Fire safety checklist:
- Don’t overload your pallets
- Assess your inventory and equipment
- Review waste removal procedures
- Conduct an end of day inspection
- Monitor, check and test your sprinkler systems
- Establish fire safety procedures
- Check electrical systems
- Don’t rely on portable heaters
Be safe.
