At Amazon site, tornado collided with company's peak delivery season

SEATTLE (NYTIMES) - Nearly every day as Christmas nears, Amazon's share of online sales typically rises, as customers turn to the e-commerce giant to quickly deliver packages.

To make that happen, Amazon hires hundreds of thousands of additional workers, both full-time employees and contractors, and runs its operations at full tilt. One of them, Mr Alonzo Harris, drove his cargo van into Amazon's delivery depot in Edwardsville, Illinois, after 8pm on Friday after a full day delivering packages north of St Louis.

Suddenly, an alarm blared on his work phone. Someone yelled that this was not a drill. Mr Harris, 44, ran into a shelter on Amazon's site and heard a loud roar. "I felt like the floor was coming off the ground," he said. "I felt the wind blowing and saw debris flying everywhere, and people started screaming and hollering and the lights went out."

One of the tornadoes that roared through Kentucky, Arkansas, Illinois and other states on Friday had plowed straight into Amazon's delivery station in Edwardsville. The toll was grim: Six people died, with 45 making it out alive, according to Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker.

On Sunday, the authorities said there were no additional reports of missing people but that search efforts were continuing. It was initially unclear how many people had been at Amazon's site and what safety measures could have been taken to minimise the loss of life. The tornado was ferocious, ripping off the building's roof. Two of the structure's 12m-high concrete walls collapsed.

The tornado coincided with a peak in the company's workforce. Americans' reliance on Amazon soon turned the deaths at the delivery depot into a focus of the public as the tornadoes' toll became clear over the weekend.

At a church service on Sunday at Thrive Church in Granite City, Illinois, about 24km from the destroyed Amazon site, clergy and congregants tried to make sense of the disaster and the company's response. "It's not lost on me, Lord, that this was an Amazon warehouse, and I, like so many other people in this country, get irritated if I can't get my Christmas gifts in three days from Amazon," Ms Sharon Autenrieth, the pastor, said during the service.

That logistical peak also complicated the rescue effort in Edwardsville. The more than 250,000 drivers like Mr Harris, who fuel Amazon's delivery network, do not work directly for the company but instead are employed by more than 3,000 contractor companies.

On Saturday, Mr Mike Fillback, the police chief in Edwardsville, said the authorities had "challenges" in knowing "how many people we actually had at that facility at the time because it's not a set staff".

Only seven people at Amazon's site were full-time employees, said a Madison County commissioner who declined to give his name. He said most were delivery drivers in their 20s who work as contractors. On Sunday, Ms Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesman, said about 190 people worked at the delivery station across all of its shifts but declined to comment on how many were full-time workers. She said the tornado formed in the parking lot, hit and then dissipated.

The tornado struck at the end of a shift, as drivers returned their vans, unloaded items and headed home. Contract drivers are not required to clock into the building, Ms Nantel said. Workers there sheltered in two places, she said, and one of those areas was directly struck. These areas are typically fortified, although it was unclear if they were built to withstand a direct tornado strike.

Based on preliminary interviews, Ms Nantel said, the company calculated that about 11 minutes elapsed between the first warning of a tornado and when it hit the delivery station. The six victims ranged in age from 26 to 62, the Edwardsville police department said on Sunday.

Amazon's model of using contractors is part of a huge push that the company started in 2018 to expand its own deliveries, rather than rely solely on shipping companies such as UPS. The company built a network of delivery stations, such as the one in Edwardsville, which are typically cavernous, single-story buildings.

Unlike Amazon's massive, multistory fulfillment centers where it stores inventory and packs items into individual packages, the delivery stations employ fewer people. Amazon employees sort packages for each delivery route in one area. Then, drivers working for contractors bring vans into another area, where the packages are rolled over in carts, loaded into the vans and driven out.

Amazon had about 70 delivery stations in the United States in 2017 and now has almost 600, with more planned, according to industry consultant MWPVL International. Globally, the company delivers more than half of its own packages, and as much a three-quarters of its packages in the United States.

Most drivers work for other companies under a program called Delivery Service Partners. Amazon has said the contracting arrangement helps support small businesses that can hire in their communities. But industry consultants and Amazon employees directly involved in the program have said it lets the company avoid liability for accidents and other risks, and limits labor organizing in a heavily unionized industry.

Ms Sucharita Kodali, an analyst at Forrester Research, said that although holiday season is critical for all retailers, it is particularly intense for Amazon. "They promise these delivery dates, so they are likely to experience the most last-minute purchases," she said.

The Edwardsville delivery station, which Amazon calls DLI4, opened last year and had room for 60 vans at once, according to planning documents.