Pallets against the wall: the fires that start outside, and the camera nobody gave a task to
Some warehouse fires start outside, in waste or pallets stored against the building. The façade camera has been watching it for days. It just needs to be asked the question.
When people picture a warehouse fire, they picture flames in the racks. The French industrial accident bureau, the BARPI, points out that some warehouse fires start outside: waste, empty pallets and packaging piled against the building, and a fire that reaches the façade before anything inside is touched.1 It also notes that the fire service often lacks water on site to put it out.1
These are quiet fires. They do not begin with a technical failure or a handling error. They begin with a habit: the skip pushed back against the wall because it was in the way in the yard, the empty pallets stacked next to dock 4 “until the collection lorry comes”, the cardboard overflowing from the waste room. States that last for days, that everyone sees, and that nobody measures.
What the 2025 campaign recorded outside
During the 2025 regional fire-risk campaign in warehouses, the absence of outdoor storage against the façades was one of the points checked, alongside emergency exits and fire aisles.2 Of 279 sites visited, 80% had at least one non-conformity.2 Outdoor storage has one particular feature: it is almost never decided. It accumulates. Between two pallet collections, between two skip rotations, the façade fills up, empties, fills again.
On the day of the visit, the inspector sees one moment of that cycle. The site cannot say whether that moment was the exception or the rule.
The camera nobody gave a task to
Almost every warehouse has a camera looking at the docks, the yard or the car park. It was installed for security: intrusions, lorries, theft. It records the façade from morning to night. And on most sites, nobody has ever asked it for anything other than footage after the fact.
That is exactly the situation Camly is built for. A task is written in plain language, on the camera and the zone you choose:
“No pallet, skip or packaging stored against the façade between dock 3 and the waste room.”
Camly checks that state at regular intervals. When pallets appear against the wall, an episode opens, with the image, the time and the camera. When the zone is clear again, the episode closes. What remains is a duration.
The duration is the useful number
Two hours of outdoor storage, while waiting for a collection lorry, is not the same risk as six days. A line reading “pallets against the wall” in a round report does not tell the two apart. An episode history does.
| What the round report says | What the Camly history says |
|---|---|
| “Pallets against the façade, dock 4” | Dock 4, episode opened Tuesday 16:10, closed Friday 09:40, 65 hours |
| “To be monitored” | Four episodes over 24 hours this month, all in even-numbered weeks |
| “Teams reminded” | Average duration divided by three since the Thursday collection was set up |
Recurrence by day and by hour describes the organisation: pallet collections too far apart, an undersized skip, a dock used as a buffer because there is no room inside. The fix is not one more instruction. It is a collection appointment, an extra skip, a floor marking. And the history then shows whether the fix held.
What the insurer’s audit looks at
A warehouse’s property insurer audits precisely the states your cameras can track: clear fire aisles, storage height below the sprinklers, combustibles away from the charging area, free emergency exits, and outdoor storage kept away from the façades.3 It audits them one day a year. What it cannot see is the other 364 days.
Our market study puts the average cost of a warehouse fire at about €1.5 million, and the expected annual loss, including business interruption, at around €17,000 for a platform and €8,500 for a mid-size site.3 These are estimates, to be validated in pilots. But they give the order of magnitude of what evidence of diligence is worth: at the audit, showing the compliance of the outdoor zone over time, the trends and the closure rate of corrective actions weighs more than a photo taken the day before.
What Camly does not do
Camly is not a fire detection system. It does not replace the fire safety system, the sprinklers or the waste collection procedure. It watches the states that precede a fire, not the fire. It does not watch people either: findings are about a zone and a state, and people on the stored images are blurred.
Where to start
Walk around the outside of your site with the camera plan. There is almost always a façade or yard camera whose field of view covers the spot where pallets pile up. That is the first outdoor task of a pilot: thirty days to find out how long, in reality, the wall stays loaded.
Sources
- BARPI / ARIA, notes on warehouse accidentology: fires starting outside (waste, pallets against the building), water supply difficulties for the fire service. aria.developpement-durable.gouv.fr, warehouse accidentology note (PDF)
- Prefecture of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, “Prévention des risques industriels : l’État mène une vaste opération coup de poing sur le risque d’incendie dans les entrepôts”, updated 16 September 2025. prefectures-regions.gouv.fr
- Camly AI, market-fit study, French warehouses, October 2026: section “Fire and property insurance”, based on the BARPI’s ARIA database; costs and expected losses are estimates of the study, to be validated in pilots. aria.developpement-durable.gouv.fr