Companies often didn't realise that accidents in warehouses happened more frequent than realised.  While not all accidents amount to heavy losses, one of the most catastrophic scenarios that can happen in a warehouse, and possibly every warehouse operator's worst nightmare, is a Rack Collapse.

Possible causes include:

• Poor or altered configuration of the racks without seeking professional assistance.
• Under designed racking system, manufactured by unqualified companies.
• No proper stowage of pallets, overloading the rack system beyond its engineered weight capacity.
• Use of mixed components from different manufacturers resulting in no form of rack system compliance.
• Copy products which have never been tested.
• Use of substitute components instead of originals.
• No proper rack maintenance and reporting system to monitor damages caused to the rack system.
• Not using pallet rack protectors.

Good Collapse Vs Bad Collapse

While damages to the rack systems are sometimes inevitable considering the amount of forklift activities happening in a warehouse on a daily basis, there are certainly ways to prevent catastrophic rack failures.

Good Collapse

A good collapse is when a section of the rack is damaged due to material handling driver error where frames are damaged so severely that collapse is inevitable. However, only that particular damaged section of the rack collapses. The rest of the rack system in the warehouse remains intact and unaffected by the rack collapse.

In this instance, damages caused to the warehouse is minimised. This happens only when the supplier of the rack system in the warehouse has products manufactured adhering to strict international industry standards.

This is known as a vertical collapse where only the adjacent bays either side of the frame is affected.

Bad Collapse

A bad collapse on the other hand results in tremendous damages. It creates a domino cross aisle collapse when the damaged section of the rack system collapses, bringing down the other sections of the racks which were originally unaffected by the rack damage.

This causes the warehouse operator to incur massive losses and greatly affect their day to day operations. It could also result in personal injury or in the worst case scenario, death of the workers.

Edited by:  Katie Carr

Source:   www.safetyrisk.net