How to Identify and Prevent Warehouse Safety Risks

How to Create a Safer and More Efficient Warehouse

– Is your warehouse operating as safely as it could be? What could increase safety and prevent common injuries within your warehouse? Warehouse injuries and fatalities have been on the rise, and the industry has seen an alarming number of injuries. With the e-commerce boom, warehouse injuries are rising above the industry average. In this video, we’ll explore practical solutions that can help you create a safer, more efficient warehouse.

My name is Ben and this is “The Lifting & Rigging Channel.” Today, Marc Smith, Warehouse Solutions Specialist at Mazzella is breaking down some of the practical solutions to increase safety within your warehouse.

What Are the Biggest Warehouse Safety Risks?

So Marc, what are some of the risks that you see in warehouses today?

– Some of the biggest risks we find are those that people walk behind and walk right next to every day, and just don’t notice them. One being damage to storage systems from forklifts, forklift impacts. Another being cluttered aisles that cause blind spots and trip hazards.

1. Identifying Hazards

How to Identify Warehouse Hazards Before Accidents Happen

– If you’re a warehouse manager, how can you identify some of the areas where safety improvements are needed?

– We always recommend getting out of the office and actually walking the floor, talking to the people on the front lines. Normally, your workers on the floor will know the sketchy areas before accidents even happen.

Also, look for near-miss indicators. Scratches, bumps, dents on racking, rack guarding, on the walls.

How Does Poor Housekeeping Cause Warehouse Injuries?

– What about just some basic housekeeping, where you’re storing your flammables, keeping your tools organized, having a system in place that you can find what you’re looking for when you need it?

– General housekeeping is a huge proponent to injuries and accidents. Everything should have a home. Everything should be clearly labeled and marked, and then monitored. You gotta make sure that they return back to their home.

2. Ergonomics

How to Prevent Ergonomic Injuries in the Warehouse

– What are some of the most common accidents that you see in warehouses?

– We see a lot of ergonomic strains, reaching and bending, and pulling and grabbing items that really are not well-positioned while stored. We want to avoid the grind in a shift, the physical exertion. So whether that be bringing the product up to what we call a golden zone. That’s between your knees and your shoulders. That’s an area of focus during every one of our site assessments is how do we bring the product to the worker instead of the worker down to the product.

– How do you bring the product to the worker?

– Through lift tables, pallet positioners, overhead cranes, carts, whether they be mechanical or electrical, letting the building work for the employee and not the employee working for the building.

– Before the camera started rolling, you were telling me about a customer that you just went to who has slide out racking.

– They’re storing some large, heavy grind wheels on static rack, and these grind wheels weigh anywhere between 40 and 500 pounds each. We’re trying to find a way to bring those products to the operator safely to where an overhead crane can come down and assist.

3. Visibility

Why Is Visibility Critical for Warehouse Safety?

– Why is visibility so important?

– You can’t be safe around something you can’t see. Also, near misses between pedestrians and equipment or pedestrians and lift trucks. So we talk about properly illuminating certain areas. End of aisles, want to make sure they’re well illuminated. Inside the aisles, you want to make sure labels are clearly marked and well illuminated, of course.

So we oftentimes see a need to upgrade existing warehouse lighting to an LED type product versus a fluorescent, just in an effort to see what’s in front of you and around the corner.

4. Rack Safety

How Often Should Pallet Racks Be Inspected?

– So let’s talk about rack safety. How can warehouse managers ensure the racking is safe and protected from damage or collapse?

– We first and foremost recommend at minimum an annual safety inspection by a third party to come in and make sure that the racking is positioned and secured, and it’s being used properly.

– Why third parties?

– Back to what we mentioned earlier, lots of times people walk by rack damage and don’t realize that it’s an issue. So by having a fresh set of eyes that knows OSHA’s requirements, they can work with the customer in helping determine, yeah, that’s something that we should monitor, or yes, that’s something that should be replaced immediately.

– So what are the risks of not inspecting pallet racks regularly?

– You’re subject to collapses and injuries, and they could lead to fatalities, of course. You want to make sure that you’re catching the small things on the front end before they become big things in the end.

You, as an employer, need to make sure the site is safe for your employees to operate. So that’s ultimately what we try to work with our customers on accomplishing.

How to Protect Warehouse Racking from Forklift Damage

– So you mentioned how important inspections are to protect racks. Is there anything else that you can be doing to increase the safety of your racks?

– Once you identify concerns that need monitored or replaced, then we also recommend the use of guarding, physical steel guards that would mount and position themselves in front of the racking.

– Like these guards right here on the floor?

– Yep, absolutely. Those are what we call upright post protectors, and those are floor-mounted and floor-anchored. Guarding is always a very low-cost option to start.

There’s what we call love taps, every day, every shift, every hour. So you just want to try to minimize those and deflect those away from the racking.

There’s a lot of different types of guards. Some mount on the floor, like what you see around us, others actually mount to the uprights. And there’s also varying heights. It really depends on the type of equipment that’s interfacing with the rack as to which type of guards and what size guards we would recommend.

5. Forklift and Pedestrian Traffic

How to Prevent Forklift and Pedestrian Accidents

– Struck by accidents are a leading cause of death and also one of the most common causes of injury. So let’s talk about some pedestrian and forklift traffic safety. What are some of the biggest risks when it comes to forklifts, traffic, and the warehouse?

– Near misses are the biggest thing. Busy warehouses have a lot of lift trucks that have a job to do, and there’s a lot of people that need to get to certain areas of the building to help support that work as well. So we like to recommend the use of zones, safety zones, zones for pedestrians, zones for forklift traffic.

– So what is a safety zone? Like how do you implement that?

– Normally, we recommend a physical guard that separates the pedestrian traffic from the forklift traffic. It’s important that forklift drivers know where they can and can’t operate, and consequently, it’s important that the pedestrians know where they can walk safely.

How to Get a Professional Warehouse Safety Audit

– So if someone’s serious about increasing safety in their warehouse, what are some next steps that they can take?

– We always recommend a professional safety audit. That would include a site visit, and we would discuss concerns that exist now versus what could exist in the future.

We don’t want to just sell you products and services. We really want to form a partnership, a safety partnership. We can come on-site, we can understand your application. We can talk to your management team and your workers, your team rather, people on the front lines, and get a better understanding about what your needs are, not only today, and also moving forward, and then help you put together a plan and help prioritize.

We realize companies can’t just throw $200,000 at safety issues. OSHA really does recommend that you have a plan, but it starts with having knowledge of known issues.

– Hopefully, this video gave you some ideas on safety improvements that could help protect the workers in your warehouse. If you’re interested in implementing any of these changes, Mazzella’s Warehouse Solutions Specialists are here to help. Contact us through the link below.

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