Warehouse Safety

Tips to Improve Dock Safety

Barry Safety, Warehouse , ,

Improving safety on a warehouse dock is crucial for preventing accidents and maintaining a secure work environment. Here are some recommendations to enhance safety:

  • Conduct regular safety training: Train all dock workers on proper safety protocols, including equipment operation, handling hazardous materials, and emergency procedures. Offer refresher courses periodically and ensure everyone understands safety regulations.
  • Provide personal protective equipment (PPE): Supply all workers with appropriate PPE, such as hard hats, safety glasses, high-visibility vests, steel-toed boots, and gloves. Encourage their consistent use and enforce PPE policies.
  • Maintain clear communication: Establish effective communication systems, such as two-way radios or intercoms, to allow clear communication between dock workers, truck drivers, and supervisors. Ensure everyone can effectively relay information, warnings, and instructions.
  • Implement traffic management: Develop a comprehensive traffic management plan for the dock area to prevent collisions and improve pedestrian safety. Clearly mark pedestrian walkways and separate them from vehicle lanes. Install signage and mirrors to enhance visibility, and consider using barriers or guardrails where necessary.
  • Ensure proper lighting: Adequate lighting is essential for a safe dock environment. Install sufficient lighting fixtures to eliminate dark areas and shadows that could obscure visibility. Regularly inspect and maintain lighting systems to address any issues promptly.
  • Regular maintenance of equipment: Establish a preventive maintenance program for all dock equipment, including forklifts, loading ramps, and conveyor systems. Regular inspections and maintenance help identify potential hazards, preventing equipment malfunctions that could lead to accidents.
  • Promote good housekeeping: Encourage a clean and organized work environment. Ensure that walkways, ramps, and loading areas are free of clutter, debris, spills, and obstacles that can cause slips, trips, or falls. Provide adequate waste management systems to prevent accumulation of waste materials.
  • Implement safety barriers and guards: Install safety barriers, guardrails, and bollards to protect pedestrians and prevent unauthorized access to restricted areas. Implement dock edge protection systems to prevent accidental falls from the dock.
  • Use warning signs and labels: Clearly display warning signs and labels to communicate potential hazards, such as restricted areas, low clearance, slippery surfaces, or areas with moving equipment. Ensure signage is prominently visible and easily understood.
  • Regular safety inspections: Conduct routine safety inspections to identify potential hazards, non-compliance with safety protocols, or equipment issues. Encourage reporting of safety concerns by workers and promptly address any identified problems.
  • Emergency preparedness: Develop and communicate emergency procedures specific to the dock area. Clearly mark emergency exits, fire extinguishers, and other safety equipment. Conduct drills periodically to ensure workers are familiar with emergency protocols.
  • Encourage employee involvement: Involve employees in safety initiatives by establishing a safety committee or encouraging their participation in safety discussions. Encourage workers to report safety concerns, near-miss incidents, or potential hazards, and reward proactive safety behavior.

Partnering with a professional material handling company gives you insight from industry professionals whose goal is to help you create a safe working environment for anyone that operates in or around your docks.

Pedestrian Safety: 16 Things You Should Know

Barry Safety, Uncategorized , , , ,
When it comes to forklift safety, a lot of emphasis is placed upon safe forklift operation, as it should be. What we see quite frequently, though, is a lack of training for employees working in a warehouse situation but who do not operate forklifts but merely work around them all day, every day. Working around them without knowledge pertaining to their potential hazards creates a dangerous scenario for catastrophe.
We recommend formal classroom training for all of your facility employees who could encounter a forklift in the course of their responsibilities. This training should cover the following:
  • Visibility: The operator’s vision is severely limited, especially when carrying a load. There are many other pitfalls of assuming that the operator is aware of the employee’s presence.
  • Eye contact: Employees should try to make eye contact with an operator. This ensures that the operator is fully aware of the employee’s presence. Busy operators may or may not be aware of the pedestrian, and any sudden move could result in a collision.
  • Stopping: A 7,000-lb. forklift carrying a 5,000-lb. load can not stop as quickly as a car, and if the operator slams on the brakes to avoid an employee, the employee could find 5,000 pounds of product hurtling in his direction.
  • Keeping your distance: Never approach a forklift from the rear. Keep beyond three feet of the side, and never stand in front of a forklift or on the forks. This keeps the pedestrian safe should any sudden movement of the forklift occur.
  • Forklifts cannot be heard: Electric forklifts are completely silent, and even internal combustion units can approach without being heard in a busy, noisy facility. Be certain that all pedestrians understand this and are diligently LOOKING for lift trucks and equipment at all times, particularly at intersections.
The potential dangers of working around this equipment: Rear ends swing wide, loads can spill, toes can be run over, and many other dangers exist if the employee is not cognizant of how to behave around a forklift. Lift trucks present a number of dangers. The operators are aware of these hazards, but pedestrians often consider forklifts benign pieces of equipment.
  • Falling loads: When walking near a lift truck depositing or retrieving a load at various heights, a pedestrian should know that loads can tumble down. The pedestrian should avoid the area at all costs.
  • Wide swings: The rear of the forklift can swing quickly to one side or the other, resulting in collision with a pedestrian or running over feet.
  • Weight: People rarely understand that forklifts are very heavy machines that cannot stop quickly. A collision often results in serious injury and sometimes death. Pedestrians need to understand this and respect the potential dangers.
  • Proper use: Pedestrians should know that they are not allowed to operate this equipment without proper training, even if it is to hop on a quickly moving lift truck to find the product they are seeking.
  • Reporting: Any unsafe conditions should be reported by pedestrians immediately to a supervisor. These include unsafe operation or conditions in the facility that create a potential for accident.
What you can do to minimize these potential dangers: As a manager or supervisor, you must ensure that each person entering your facility, whether he is another employee or a guest, understands these potential hazards and is alert for them when in your facility.
  • Training and briefing: Training pedestrians or employees who regularly enter your facility should be a requirement, whether the person is an employee, vendor, or other guest who is a regular visitor. If you have an occasional visitor, this guest should be briefed on what type of equipment you operate, how it operates, your safety procedures, and the need to be alert at all times.
  • Install lanes and pedestrian islands: Simple pedestrian lanes painted on the floor and training on how to use them are the ultimate scenario to protect pedestrians. Having protected islands for pedestrians to pack or perform other duties keeps them safe when working among forklifts.
  • Lighting: Provide adequate lighting in aisles and other areas to ensure maximum visibility.
  • Set speed limits: Finding the balance between maximizing productivity and creating a safe environment for employees is key. Aisle speeds and intersection speeds will vary and are different for each facility.
  • Install mirrors at intersections: Then, train employees and operators alike to use them to see what’s coming around the corner.
  • Ensure that all safety devices on all of your lift trucks are operational: Items like back-up alarms, horns, and lights should be checked daily to ensure operational effectiveness.
It takes only a few seconds of inattentiveness for an accident to occur. Training, informing, and monitoring produce a safe work environment and minimize your bottom line exposure, should an accident occur.
Safety is no accident, and if we can be of any service to you in creating a safe work environment, we are here to help.

Four Traits of Safety-Minded Companies

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Apex Safety FirstAs managers and owners, we want a safe work environment for all of our employees. Unfortunately, all too often it escapes us. Time passes quickly, and initiatives that were once important standards become guidelines or even merely suggestions. How can we ensure that when we put safety measures in place, they will stay in place as employees come and go in a business climate that is constantly in flux?

While we lack the space to answer this question in full detail here, there are a few major approaches to providing a safe work environment that transcend industries, equipment and facilities. We outline these “hows and whys” of workplace safety below.

Since 1970, OSHA has worked to create a safer workplace for all employees, and their mission has been very successful. However, accidents still happen, and not only at companies willfully violating OSHA standards. Sometimes safety goes beyond meeting standards due to unique circumstances in certain operations.

The following are a few approaches to safety that have helped both large and small companies to achieve better workplace safety, fewer incidents and accidents, lower costs, more productivity and better workplace attitudes.

  1. Safety is integrated with company mission

    Safe companies put as much emphasis on doing things safely as on doing them productively. From day one, every employee knows they are working for a company that would rather they do their job safely than quickly. These employees will lockout a piece of equipment when something goes wrong, will replace light bulbs that need it instead of ignoring them and will report unsafe behavior or unsafe conditions.

  2. Training never ends

    Employees are involved in ongoing training – how to lift more safely, how to sit properly in a chair, how to operate a certain piece of equipment and so on. Your business is fluid: things change; equipment changes; and equipment, building space and employees are added. As your conditions change, your training must address these changes. Training for the safest work environments is never a one-time event or a two- or three-day training initiation. It is an ongoing pursuit of the safest possible work facility. It should be a goal of all employees to see that their coworkers go home safe every night.

  3. Involvement at all levels

    While involvement in a safe work environment must start from the corner office, the mission and strategy it is also important to ensure that every employee knows that they are involved and responsible. It is a good idea to create safety teams for every facet of your business, to revolve people in and out of those teams, and to have them conduct frequent facility or department reviews to identify potential threats. The most successful companies have reward systems for reporting anything that could be a potential threat, even if it is as minor as a sharp corner on a coat rack. This keeps all employees engaged in creating a safe work environment.

  4. Accountability

    Once you have established your safety mission and mapped out your strategy, everyone involved must be held accountable. No one can shirk their safety responsibilities. If a sharp corner on a coat rack is missed and someone gets cut, find out why no one noticed. Are they doing regular inspections? If safety standards are not being met, it is the leadership’s job to find out why and fix it. Everyone must know that if an accident happens on their watch, it must be accounted for and a plan must be designed to ensure that it will not happen again.

A truly safe, productive and profitable workplace is attained through ongoing efforts, and these are just a few of the major traits of successful organizations. We encourage you to seek the assistance of OSHA, NIOSH or other private safety consultants to help you organize and strategize your safety plans.

A safe organization on all levels is happier and more productive. Take advantage of the benefits of being a safety-minded organization and watch the benefits blossom.