Forklift bump causes massive collapse in warehouse

Big Chief · November 2018

Flimsy shelving...............this has been all over the news.........happened last year. Seems someone would tell where it was.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6409331/Forklift-driver-causes-entire-warehouse-fall-like-dominoes-nudges-shelving-unit.html

bisley · November 2018

Amazing video, but hardly the destruction of the entire warehouse. It's more like a bad train wreck, which makes a huge mess, but gets cleaned up in a couple of weeks and goes back to business as usual.

10canyon53 · November 2018

Not the first video I have seen like that. If it happened in the U.S. I would hate to see the fines OSHA handed out.

Old Ron · November 2018

Note to self ...... don't bump things in shop 1 or 2 here .

Make_My_Day · November 2018

Wow, I hope no one was buried under that.

orchidman · November 2018

Back when I was a young fella working in the family winery one of my jobs was to stack pallets of wine cases in the warehouse using a forklift. In those days each pallet held 60 cartons of wine ( 720 quart bottles) and the pallets were stacked 3 high.

The integrity of the stacks relied on careful operation and placement of each pallet by the forklift driver ( there were 2 of us and 2 forklifts) in a careful and gentle manner.

The arrival of an efficiency expert to try and streamline different aspects of the winery operation to make it more efficient was not accepted by most of us. He spent a couple of weeks studying every single part of the winery including the warehouse and came up with a whole raft of new ideas.

One was to increase storage space by stacking the pallets 4 high...........

The day arrived when he turned up to supervise the rearrangement of the warehouse.

We expressed our concern about stacking pallets 4 high and said we didnt think the bottom row of cartons/bottles in a stack that high would support the 3 pallets on top.

His reply was that he had done the loading calculations, that he was the expert, that he knew what he was doing and that he would stake his reputation on his calculations being correct.

So, the two of us on forklifts started rearranging things according to his floor plan.It took most of the morning and early afternoon.

We finished the job, shut the forklifts down and decided to have a 'smoke' break. He joined us and made a few comments about how everything went well and we shouldnt have doubted his expertise..................

Nek minute we heard a muffled cracking sound of a bottle breaking.........followed by a couple more.......... then a whole bunch.

A slow trickle of wine ran out from between the middle of the row of stacks in the centre of the warehouse which soon became much more than a trickle...........

My cousin and I looked at each other then started running towards the door with the 'efficiency expert' close behind. Just as we reached it there was a cacaphony of sound as the stacks started collapsing.

The end result was that all the stacks collapsed as the cartons got wet over a period of 15 minutes, and while not all bottles broke, the whole warehouse was awash with port, sherry, white and red table wines.

Took 10 of us 2 weeks to carefully clean up the mess. All the bottles that hadnt been broken has to be washed, their labels removed, packed in wooden crates and sent back to be re-labeled , packed and palleted and then stacked 3 high ............

The company that supplied the efficiency expert had to pay out the damages through their insurance.....

jbp-ohio · November 2018

Could be worse............

zorba · November 2018

Yuk...

tennmike · November 2018

I bet this guy had to go change his skivvies after this little accident.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6030353/uploads/editor/kt/rljiq35588xc.jpg

zorba · November 2018

YIKES!

tennmike · November 2018

cpj said:

tennmike said:

I bet this guy had to go change his skivvies after this little accident.

Ain’t buying that for one second. Too perfect. And the bomb is just “sitting there” perfectly on the forks.
Riiiiight.

Take a good hard look at the 'skid marks' the forks left in the pavement. That bomb overloaded the lift capacity of the forklift, and it reared up in the rear and dragged the forks before it hit the loading dock.

earlyagain · November 2018

I once saw a drunken fork lift driver fall off the dock. Fortunately he had first dismounted the lift.

Used to pick up spools of raw paper. Very heavy. Guy that loaded them was half nutz. Raced across a metal plate bridge with the spools full speed slam bang rocking the trailer like a ship in a storm.

Went to pick up a loaded trailer once. Dock foreman acted odd. I scaled the load to have a look. Forklift was loaded in the nose unsecured, forks faceing foreward. No go guys, unload it.

People are dangerously ignorant. Worker beware.

10canyon53 · November 2018

cpj said:

Had that happened, the bomb would have rolled. Ain’t buying it. I’ve seen, done, and been part of enough photoshop jobs to not trust a damn thing I see.

It's on the Internet, it must be true.

However, it is hard to say for sure due to the quality of the picture, but it appears that there are a pair of metal straps securing the bomb in the cradle. Also, I would expect there to be a set of loops underneath the cradle specifically for the forks. This greatly helps to secure the load on the forks and is a very common design for racks/containers that hold delicate or dangerous items. I would think a bomb qualifies as a dangerous item. I know that if I were the one designing a transport/storage system for bombs, both of those safety measures would be included. If you look closely, you can also see where the corner of the cradle scraped along the pavement. I don't doubt that this could be photo-shopped, but I don't think it is.

10canyon53 · November 2018

A few years ago I watched a co-worker lose a forklift off a dock. The wheels of his delivery truck were not chocked. Driving the forklift into the truck was not an issue. When he backed out and the rear tires were on the dock the front tires (the drive tires) kicked the truck out from underneath the forklift. He did not ride the forklift down as he should have, but got lucky and was able to jump onto the back of the truck as the forklift went down. The forklift was a tough little Caterpillar and sustained no damage. He just drove it back around and up the ramp.

jbp-ohio · November 2018

As long as the fuse isn't in the bomb you could drop it from 30,000' and it's not going off.....

jbp-ohio · November 2018

If the two gouges in the pacement are from the forks, then this happened backwards. He didn't drive off of the dock. He was backing up and the weight shifted raising the rear of the forklift. Once the rear tires are off of the ground you can't steer. He whiskey throttled backwards until the dock stopped him.

Michakav · November 2018

jbp-ohio said:

Could be worse............

Saw that about a year ago in a safety meeting. BRUTAL!

tennmike · November 2018

cpj said:

tennmike said:

cpj said:

tennmike said:

I bet this guy had to go change his skivvies after this little accident.

Ain’t buying that for one second. Too perfect. And the bomb is just “sitting there” perfectly on the forks.
Riiiiight.

Take a good hard look at the 'skid marks' the forks left in the pavement. That bomb overloaded the lift capacity of the forklift, and it reared up in the rear and dragged the forks before it hit the loading dock.

Had that happened, the bomb would have rolled. Ain’t buying it. I’ve seen, done, and been part of enough photoshop jobs to not trust a damn thing I see.

The bomb is strapped down in the cradle. That's the two silver straps at front and rear next to the bomb hanger hooks. And that bomb wouldn't be fused while on the pallet; that's done right before loading onto the airplane.

I did the same thing with a forklift and a bunch of cast iron castings at the plow company. The casters had loaded the 4 foot x 5 foot x 3 foot high steel box over the top lip of the box, and that was not supposed to happen. I figured if the forklift could lift it, I'd just take it really slow. Every time I let off on the accelerator to make a turn the rear of the forklift lifted off the floor. I WAS smart enough to only have the box feet about 4 inches off the floor, though. Got it to where it was supposed to go without spilling anything or having an accident. Safety guy didn't work night shift so it was all cool!

olesniper · November 2018

I'm in and out of a warehouse, with racks like that, all the time. No telling what gauge steel was used but those uprights were way undersized.
I worked in a soft drink bottling plant, back when everything was cans and returnable bottles. We didn't use no stinking racks. We stacked skids of drinks 3 high, with the boards of the upper skids resting on the caps of the bottles below them. You did not want to be anywhere near a stack, if a board on the bottom of a center skid snapped.

MileHighShooter · November 2018

Worst ive ever done was put a fork through a wall.

rberglof · November 2018

I operated forklifts for years moving pallets of fire brick and feel good about never having a mishap any worse then dropping a few brick.

FFLshooter · November 2018

That original video above is of the Ramen Noodle factory. That incident put them $143 in the hole.

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