What Makes Pallet Racking Unsafe?

How does a warehouse benefit turn into warehouse safety hazards? In the form of pallet racking, it can be costly to both your business image and your employee wellbeing when your racking suffers an accident that compromises the integrity of the system.

If not maintained and inspected regularly, your warehouse storage equipment can quickly become a common warehouse hazard. Here are some causes to look out for.

Inadequate Training

Every warehouse has an instance where inadequately trained employees have used or maintained warehouse pallet racking and it turned out for the worse. These are more likely to cause accidents than any other.

All employees who work around a system of this kind need to understand how to operate around it, understand the dangers of working under them and, more importantly, how to report any incident which can compromise the entire system.

All employees need to be fully trained in safety precautions around the pallet racking to reduce the risks of both harm and damage.

Irregular Inspection

If your pallet racking is not regularly inspected, serious or light damage that can lead to a full racking collapse is being ignored – that poses the biggest possible risk to workers and company operations overall.

Signs of wear and tear and where repairs would require immediate action being taken going unnoticed leaves a bad impression on your company’s health and safety measures. If your racking is not safe, your business is not safe.

Be sure to have the racking inspected monthly and repair where needs repairing to avoid catastrophe.

Overload

Everyone should know how important it is to have a safe and reliable storage solution in place, but the weight they hold has a nasty habit of becoming overloaded by not double-checking the inventory and overstocking.

This can mean shifting certain products to an area with commercial shelving – or simply downsizing your stock intake on certain items not shifting as fast as others. Having control over your stock amounts and ensuring you do not have an excessive amount of stock provide struggle for your system, you make the difference between a full collapse and a longer lifespan for your system.

Worn Out Parts

Moving parts on pallet racking systems can wear out and make the likelihood of a collapse more apparent.

Rust can occur when exposed to elements or chemicals regularly, and these are instances that need to be reported as soon as noticed. Sometimes they can be rusted beyond repair, and the entire system will require replacing.

In those instances of warehouse safety hazards, contact the team at Monarch Shelving so that a full appraisal of your current and future needs can be fully planned.