WERE THEY DRINKING?

Three order-filling robots collide at supermarket warehouse, triggering massive fire

A collision between three robots at a British online supermarket’s largest warehouse sparked a massive fire that has shut down operations for days.

© Provided by National Post An Ocado 'hive' scuttle around the grid in a video by the company.

National Post Staff , Bloomberg News 

Around a hundred firefighters and 15 fire engines responded to the blaze that occurred at Ocado’s largest automated warehouse on Friday, located in Erith, south east London. About 800 staff evacuated from the three-storey facility and no injuries were reported, the London’s fire department said in a statement.

“The fire was deep seated and was a challenging operation,” they said. It took close to 14 hours to put out.

In the ensuing days, thousands of orders have been delayed or cancelled, according to the Financial Times. It’s the second time in three years one of the company’s automated facilities has had a fire-related accident, the newspaper said.

A ‘collision of three bots’ that were used to fill orders triggered the fire, the company said on Saturday. The company expects the facility to begin operating again “within the coming week” as the damage is limited to a small section of “less than 1%” of the grid, it added.

Ocado’s share price fell to its lowest level in over a year and extended 2021 losses to 23%.

A video on Youtube shows their dizzying grid system at work. Hundreds of tightly packed bots zip along the sprawling grid, dropping off crates of groceries for humans, or other robots, to assemble into orders. The robots can move along the grid at a pace of four meters per second and handle thousands of orders a day, according to Insider.

© London Fire Department The blaze took 14 hours for London Fire Department to stamp out.

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However, the latest incident has raised further questions about the retailer’s robot horde. A huge blaze destroyed Ocado’s distribution center in Andover, southern England, in 2019, requiring a total rebuild. That incident was caused by an electrical fault in a battery that caused a robot to catch fire.

Ocado said the Andover fire had no implications for the viability of the group’s model. It has since signed several more technology partnership deals with overseas supermarket groups.

But a second robot fire may concern existing and potential customers of Ocado’s technology.