Viviez, 2024: the cause of the warehouse fire was on the site's own recordings
Investigators found the origin of a warehouse fire on the site's own cameras, fifteen months later. The cameras saw it; nobody was watching.
On 17 February 2024 a warehouse burned in Viviez, in the Aveyron. In May 2025 the French industrial accident investigation bureau, the BEA-RI, published its report. The most likely cause, it writes, was the thermal runaway of a portable battery stored in a plastic container. It knows this because it watched the site’s video recordings.1
That sentence deserves a pause. The origin of a fire that destroyed a warehouse was not reconstructed from samples or witness statements. It was recorded. A fixed camera was looking at the storage zone; it saw the battery, the container, the first minutes. All of it served the investigation, fifteen months later, when the building no longer existed.
What the report says, and what it does not
The BEA-RI does not blame the cameras: they did exactly what they are installed for, which is to record. The report describes portable batteries stored in a plastic container and concludes that thermal runaway was the most likely cause.1 It does not say an operator could have intervened in time; it does not say the opposite either. What it establishes is that the situation that preceded the fire was visible.
That is the distinction we want to draw: recorded and watched are two different things. A recording is evidence for afterwards. An observation is information for during.
Grand-Couronne, thirteen months earlier
On 16 January 2023 a logistics warehouse burned in Grand-Couronne, near Rouen. The BEA-RI report, published in March 2025, describes lithium-metal-polymer batteries stored in a rack, a flash seen by staff, then a thermal runaway feeding a high-intensity fire that went on to consume the stock.2
Here too, the decisive element lies in the storage conditions of the first minutes: which batteries, in which rack, next to what. These are states of the site. They last for hours or days before the event, and a zone camera records them all day long without anyone looking.
What a state task would have reported
Camly does not detect a fire. It checks, at regular intervals, whether a state described in plain language is true in a zone of an existing camera. On a battery storage zone, the task reads like this:
| What the site writes | What the agent checks | What comes out |
|---|---|---|
| “No battery stored outside the dedicated cabinet” | Batteries or containers present in the zone, outside the cabinet | An alert with the image, the time, the camera |
| “No combustibles in the clearance zone” | Cardboard, film, wooden pallets touching the rack | An episode with a start, an end, a duration |
| “The zone is tidy at end of shift” | The state at the scheduled time | A line in the monthly report |
The result is not one more video. It is a duration: the battery in its plastic container was there from 9:40 to 17:15, three days in a row. That is what an HSE manager can turn into an action the same day, and what they can show in the risk assessment document (DUERP), to the works council and to the insurer as proof that the risk is monitored and corrected.
What cameras do not do
It has to be said plainly, because both BEA-RI reports describe fast and violent fires:
- A camera does not detect the start of a fire. That is the job of the fire safety system, the detectors and the sprinklers. Camly watches the states that precede a fire, not the fire.
- A periodic check catches what lasts. It replaces neither the battery storage rule, nor the dedicated cabinet, nor staff training.
- Findings are about zones and objects. No person is identified, stored images are blurred, and questions about an employee are refused by design.
Where to start
List the zones where your site stores or charges batteries: forklifts, pallet trucks, portable tools, customer returns. For each one, find the camera that covers it and write in one sentence what must never be there. Three zones, three sentences, thirty days: that is exactly the scope of a Camly pilot, and it is the report you would rather have before, instead of the recording the investigator will consult after.
Sources
- BEA-RI, report on the SOPAVE warehouse fire, Viviez, 17 February 2024 (May 2025); cause identified from the site’s video recordings. igedd.developpement-durable.gouv.fr
- BEA-RI, report on the Highway France Logistics 8 warehouse fire, Grand-Couronne, 16 January 2023 (March 2025). report (PDF)