Just some tips we’ve picked up along the way when it comes to keeping pallet racks safe:

• The majority of pallet rack structural failures result from just three sources – know them, and most of the rest takes care of itself. Those include (1) impacts from a lift truck collision; (2) Misuse and overloading (3) Lack of comprehension that racks can be dangerous, and the lack of a safety oriented mindset. Really, the focus is on #3 gets you to #1 and #2. Operations with a safety mindset will also understand that impacts are deadly, and they know how to safely load their racks.
• Check out “When Racks Collide” for more information on protecting your racks.
• Know how your rack will be used when you spec it. “The two main rack safety points are the proper initial design of the structure so it doesn’t collapse, and proper training of personnel to ensure a clear understanding of the structure’s operational characteristics,” said Rack Manufacturer’s Institute (RMI) President John Nosfinger in a 2008 Modern Materials Handling article. If you inherited the pallet rack in your operation from someone else, find out the details of the rack system and its design. File that so that anyone can access it, and enforce your capacity ratings so that your racks will not be overloaded or mis-loaded.

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Craig Chamberlain has an article over at the MHEDA Edge website that you need to read if you use pallet rack wire decking.

Here’s the money quote:

“Decking can, and often does, directly bear the total weight of the application’s load and transfers that load to the beams of the pallet rack. Regardless of the weight-bearing capacity of the rack’s beams, an improperly overrated deck can and will jeopardize the load-bearing capacity of the entire system and result in a failure.”

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Pallet racks take a beating over time. They get loaded with exceptionally heavy pallets, by exceptionally powerful lift trucks over and over throughout the course of years. Chances are that if you have pallet rack in your warehouse, it’ll get hit at some point. When it does, inspecting (and generally replacing) it is your best course of action. But what about avoiding that hit, or its dangerous aftermaths in the first place?

Rack is easy to ignore from a safety standpoint. In fact, it’s too easy. Other hazards might stick out like a sore thumb, so there are times plant managers or warehouse supervisors can be less concerned than they should for hundreds of tons of racks and load in a warehouse bustling workers and lift trucks.

Here are some ways to avoid (or minimize) lift truck/rack impacts…

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Unguarded rack is flat-out dangerous if orders are being picked in the lower bays, or there is consistent foot traffic below. Safety managers know this, insurance companies know it, and if you have rack in your facility, you should know it too. Look, we have all probably seen pallets break. We’ve seen drivers make mistakes when loading & unloading. We’ve seen things fall off. If you’ve been in the business any length of time, you may have walked into your warehouse in the morning to find a case of something from the fourth level split open on the floor. It happens to everyone, and if you’re in the industry long enough, it’ll happen to you.

Stuff falls off of racks, and if we’re fortunate, none of the stuff hits someone. But you can also prevent that drop in the first place and maybe save the stored inventory as well. So if you buy into the fact that your racks should have some fall protection, then the question becomes: “what kind?”

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It’s safe to say that there is shelving of some kind in almost every warehousing operation. Even a sophisticated distribution center usually has some fallback storage in the form of rack, shelving or other storage. For those applications that require a lot of heavy-duty shelving, though, issues of capacity come to the forefront.

A few years back, we had a customer who asked us to quote a good amount of rivet shelving (you might call it particle board, boltless, or by a brand like Riveteer or Penco’s Rivet Rite). It was a good sized project and that customer ended up buying it used from another company. He was happy with it right up until it collapsed and dumped hundreds of bins of aerospace components to the floor. The problem? He was storing something very heavy on either a shelf or on a post that couldn’t handle it. Once one of the shelves buckled, it set off a chain reaction that was kind of like dominoes and a whole lot of shelves went down. The components were similar looking, except for sizes, and it was pretty much a total loss.

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Wire decking is ubiquitous with selective pallet rack–it’s perhaps the most broadly-specified selective rack accessory. People use it to when they want pallet support with greater structural strength than other materials, when they want to load boxes or other non-palletized load onto racks, when they want to handle loads that aren’t deep enough to sit on uprights, and when they want to eliminate dust and debris inherent with solid decking materials…

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