A rice depot had to be evacuated after a motor on a conveyor belt overheated.

Firefighters were called out to Veetee Rice Ltd on Medway City Estate, Strood, at about midnight on Thursday after smoke emitting from the motor alerted workers to the situation.

A fire crew from Strood went out to the warehouse and isolated the power supply to the site so they could enter the building to identify where the smoke was coming from.

A spokesman for Kent Fire and Rescue Service, said: “We used a thermal imaging camera to see where the heat source was coming from and quickly identified it was a motor on a conveyer belt which had overheated and that had set the building’s smoke alarms off.

“We were there four about an hour and left the warehouse engineers fixing the problem.