CHS plant in gas leak emergency

CHS fell behind on stock deliveries last week after a dangerous gas leak at its Brentford warehouse forced the distributor to shut down its depot all day Tuesday.

Up to 40 staff were evacuated from the building while British Gas was called in to investigate. No one was hurt.

The crisis happened just two days after CHS had consolidated its combined CHS/Merisel warehousing, moving all its stock to the one site and closing down remaining outlets.

Jan Lawford, director of vendor management at CHS, said: 'Everything to do with the merger had been going relatively smoothly. We'd put in an immense amount of work repositioning the stock and then at midday on Tuesday we had the gas leak and had to evacuate. So we lost out on business in terms of shipping goods that day.'

The interruption dragged on longer than expected because British Gas could not establish the leak itself, leaving a CHS employee to solve the problem.

Lawford said that the company was now 'back on stream', and fulfilling its 24-hour delivery service.