No Fire Without Smoking as IP Cameras Boost Fire Safety

The installation of IP cameras has eliminated a major fire risk at a major food distributor.

In a classic example of security precautions achieving fire-safety goals, cameras were installed at McBurney Refrigeration’s Liverpool storage depot after bosses grew concerned that delivery drivers were regularly smoking near flammable materials.

NW Systems Group installed 11 Merit LILIN IP cameras, multi-megapixel devices with built-in infrared LED lighting, as part of a package of improvements required to gain food safety standards certification from the British Retail Consortium (BRC).

McBurney acted after some of its larger customers, including ASDA, began demanding compliance with BRC standards as a condition of doing business in the wake of the horse-meat scandal.

Fire regulations were flouted routinely by overseas drivers, who often smoked cigarettes in front of chiller doors, near to flammable insulation materials. It also compromised entrance security because they could hold doors open for unauthorised individuals.

Smoking in these areas effectively ceased as soon as the cameras were installed.

“We had specific concerns about enforcing a site-wide ban on smoking, which had proved difficult,” said Peter Amos, warehouse manager at McBurney Refrigeration. “We had also experienced some shrinkage of frozen fish stocks in the top floor of the warehouse.

“Some drivers passing through this site come from as far afield as Spain or Portugal. They drive customers’ trucks full of chilled vegetables up to this site, before delivering the produce onto the retailers’ regional distribution centres.”

Merit LILIN IP cameras can provide 10 frames per second, HD resolution images around the clock, all recording on motion.

3x LILIN LD6122EX, 2xLILIN IPD6222ES, 1x LILIN IPG1022ESX3.5 and 5x LILIN LR7722ES cameras were deployed. 3x Veracity OUTSOURCE PoE midspans, 1x Veracity OUTREACH Repeater combined with 1x LILIN 5-port PoE switch and 3x Levelone 8-port PoE switch were used to provide Power over Ethernet (PoE) to all cameras.

The Milestone XProtect Essential video management system was configured on the 8 TB GVD IPX RAID-based server, configured to handle video images from up to 30 cameras, storing images for up to 60 days – a period some retailers retain video evidence for.

The cameras used McBurney’s existing fibre network serving the warehouse and offices. The cameras themselves were linked to the corporate network via CAT5 Ethernet cabling and three secure video transmission points.

Stephen Serna, IT manager at McBurney Refrigeration said NW systems installed the cameras “in just one day. It enabled us to secure BRC accreditation within a couple of weeks of it going in and we now have an open architected, Windows-based system which uses all our existing cabling and virtual private networking (VPN) infrastructure. This allows us to expand and upgrade it easily when the opportunity arises to do so.”

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