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Some staff members are trouble, right from the start. Some staff members cause you so much heartache and expense that you question your own intelligence for having ever let them inside the building. This is one such employee. I’ll let the video tell the story…
I'm Barry Chandler and I'm The Bar Blogger. I've been involved in the bar and hospitality industry for 16 years. From Bartender to Bar Manager and from Food & Beverage Controller to Small Business Owner, I have worked with more than 500 bars in the last five years to help them streamline their costs and run a more profitable business and more than 800 bars and clubs use my Management Toolkit which can be accessed at ManageYourBar.com.
You cannot blame all that on the worker. Shouldn’t there have been some yellow and black highlighted concrete bumpers at each corner of warehouse shelving? There were barriers missing.
There is no enough evidence to talk about blaming anyone. The driver was easing back, a puff of smoke somes from his truck and it suddenly accelerates, did he may have mistakenly pressed on the gas instead of the brake. Lift trucks require training and rules enforcement. Protective barriers at racks are a good idea but there is no requirement to do so.
Old rule of thumb as long as you have one lift truck operating you need two maintenance guys, one to keep the truck run and one to repair what the driver tears up.
I think the video should be taken in the context it was meant. Entertainment! I understand the guy was unharmed…
Actually, it is the company that should be looked at a little closer. I have worked 10+ years in a storage warehouse. I could tell from one look at the size of the racking, that it was not strong enough to hold that kind of weight. Take a good look at the video when the racking starts to fall. If that was constructed to code, it should be able to withstand COMPLETE failure of 1 beam with out the entire thing coming down, or as Indy says, put concrete pillars at each corner.
The warehouse that I worked in was dry goods only. Including the skid that the product sat on, nothing was heavier than 300 pounds and our racks were TWICE as thick as those in the video. The forklift used appeared to be a Hyster, though I can’t be sure. Our racks have taken head on collisions from the same type of lift with the only damage being an employee with rattled teeth. Notice in the video how the entire racking quickly fails when the lift hits it. A sure sign of a storage system that is grossly overloaded. It is a VERY good thing that no one was hurt. I don’t know what was in the boxes (someone said vodka) but if it was something as heavy as stored liquids, that racking would have failed with something as simple as uneven picking, and then there WOULD be fatalities.
Naah. Can’t really blame the employee – Maybe, maybe not. The company however, can more readily and conclusively be taken to task, as the storage racks really should either be stronger, or loaded less or whatever it takes to ensure stability.
I think in this case, the warehouse got what it deserved by not building a more secure workplace!