Online supermarket Picnic immediately removes “several dozen” delivery cars from the road, after nine of those cars were destroyed in a fire in Almelo last Sunday night. It concerns all cars from the same series as the destroyed cars. Picnic will let you know after questions from NRC† The characteristic electric vehicles, small trucks, are used, for example, in cities such as Almelo, Doetinchem, Harderwijk, Heerenveen and Leeuwarden. The company expects it to take two to three weeks to replace the cars and expects to cancel orders from at least “several thousand” customers.
The company states that it is taking it “on the safe side”, while in the meantime the cause of the fire in the so-called ‘delivery hub’ in Almelo is being further investigated. „Messages arrive here packed and in crates and are shipped from here last mile drove to the customer”, explains a Picnic employee who is responsible for company safety in front of the broken glass facade of the burned down warehouse.
A dozen undamaged carts were towed away one by one in front of the building this Tuesday. In the meantime, the Twente Fire Service has announced that it has transferred the investigation to the experts of the insurers. “The conflagration was so devastating that we expect little more from it.”
Damage experts from the Netherlands Research Institute have also been involved in the case by Picnic. It is suspected that a short circuit in the cars was the cause of the fire. At the end of last year, another Picnic building in Roosendaal in Brabant was also destroyed.
Speculation
The fire in Almelo has led to a barrage of speculation† For example, activist farmers would have something to do with the fire. Foreign reporters and commentators in particular put forward this theory. Almelo was visited on Monday by reporters from alternative right media from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Japan. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon spoke on his online show Real America’s Voice on his platform War Room for example with a correspondent of his program that had stood in front of the Picnic building, which claimed that the farmers’ protests in the Netherlands are part of a “third world war”.
The conservative commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek spoke told the alternative-right Rebel News, among other things, about an investment of 600 million euros from Bill and Melinda Gates that Picnic would have received to implement the “globalist agenda” of the World Economic Forum (WEF), which calls for agricultural reform would occupy a central place. Picnic says that the investment did not come from the Gates family, but from an investment fund that independently decides on applications.
The police do not consider the location of the shed, located right next to the Almelo hospital, as a crime scene and the company also has “no indication” that the fire was started.
With the collaboration of Wilmer Heck