Avoiding Pallet Racking Catastrophes

We’ve all seen those online videos of pallet racking collapsing and causing total disaster within a warehouse environment, which is why warehouse safety is so important.

Whilst it may provide a laugh or two on the home video platforms, in business it costs hundreds and thousands of pounds worth of damage to stock and business hours that are halted due to the results, not to mention the threat of serious injury to anyone in any form of an industrial accident.

In a lot of instances, pallet rack collapses can be avoided and many occur through the advent of bad practice, poor and unmaintained racking or training not being as good as it should be. Let’s examine the risks of pallet racking collapse and the measures undertaken to prevent it happening to you.

Immediate Risks

The threat to life is a given, but on top of that businesses face a ton of risk to operations and operatives also.

Naturally, the prime concern is a severe injury to a worker, but also the threat of death should not be passed aside. Thousands of pounds of stock falling on top of an employee is a sure-fire way to fatality and is not a worst-case scenario. It’s a very real one on many occasions.

On the other side of the spectrum is the amount of fines that a business can face by failure to keep equipment and racking in safe and working order. Fines and prosecution are a common lower-level threat for most businesses than the death of an employee but all the more occurring.

Also, let’s consider the amount of stock you lose. Not just from the damaged section but other surrounding stock also. This is stock that has to be written off which is very costly for your orders and your customers should they be a high demand item.

On top of all of the above is the downtime you will have to face to clear the area and repair the damage to shelving. Investigations may also be launched into the origins of the incident which can result in your company facing further downtime.

What this will all succumb to no matter what is a loss of business with customer orders unable to be fulfilled, which will undoubtedly result in a loss of certain contracts and an even bigger loss of reputation for your company.

Immediate Fixes

By now you will understand that simply updating your pallet racking is a small fraction of money compared to the loss.

It may suit you to think of the “ain’t broke, don’t fix” mentality towards your warehouse, but by not taking the precautions into account on regular intervals you face impacts on all fronts of injury, loss, prosecution and worst of all death.

At Monarch Shelving we provide businesses with reinforced pallet racking and warehouse storage equipment to a secure and protected workforce and workflow. Contact us today to keep your business spaces safe and secure and maintain warehouse safety.