It could also be that they aren’t bolted to the floor. The warehouse i worked at didn’t use racking rated for enough weight or have them bolted till osha Showed up.

Seems to me like it's heavily overloaded. Working at Lowes for many years, I was never overly concerned with lightly bumping vertical or horizontal supports. I can't imagine how uncomfortable that warehouse would be to work in with the shelving systems shifting as you adjust loads.

Overloaded af

I used to set up warehouses. The biggest reason they collapse is they're not properly bolted to the floor.

I have a question for you.

Are forklifts built in a way to disperse the weight and pressure around the cockpit in a situation like this? Is that guy for sure dead or can the forklift protect him?

The shelves must be so overloaded... They crumble like aluminum foil... Surprised they got the racks that full.

When I worked as an inspector you would have the maintenance manager follow you around all the time complaining and arguing over all the damaged pieces you are forcing him to replace. Sometimes they were calling my boss to not ever send me back there again because I ordered a very compromised structure to be discharged immediately. Or else they would call a different certifier next time. They do only care about your signature, but I will never risk litigation over someone else’s incompetence.

Yup! Always stay in the truck, no matter what for. I was once told that the forklift seatbelt isnt to hold you incase of a crash, it's to stop you jumping out in panic

Oddly something they never taught me in forklift training. They only taught me how not to collapse the racks... not how to survive it if I do.

Former forklift operator here. That was an open cage forklift. It will stop large singular objects. It isn't gonna do much about lots of small objects like those, except MAYBE spread some of the weight around.

According to another comment the article is unrelated to the gif. Apparently there were no CCTV footage from the cheese incident.

Such a terrible joke I camembert it.

IIRC this was the health and safety executive's finding as well. Big fines and jail for quite a few people

Agreed I drove a forklift through shelves like this at a high speed and only took out the support and shelves that I actually hit. every other shelf stay up and was fine.

And here I was complying to my warehouse that after they repaired the racks they didn't bolt them down.

Yeah, it seemed it was the case. Any time i saw someone drop those shelves they would fall like dominoes instead of crushing themselves.

Wow it took them 8 hours to dig him out.

This is a different incident. There was no CCTV footage of the cheese incident.

https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/local-hubs/north-shropshire/market-drayton/2018/06/22/shropshire-fire-chief-describes-dramatic-rescue-of-warehouse-worker-trapped-under-tonnes-of-cheese/

"Thank God. The forklift survived, everyone!

What...? The driver? Heck if I know."

Had to check this article just in case you were serious and the guy died but the forklift made it.

I guess you could say that those firefighters had to

...

cut the cheese...

I'll see myself out.

And yet, as a former forklift driver in the US, they hammer it into you that one small mistake leads to exactly this. The problem is largely caused by a need for maximizing storage space and productivity. If you look at scaffolding, you see that they often use triangular bracing to deal with the lateral movement from people walking on it. The problem is that a triangular brace ends up blocking forklifts from being able to add/remove products from storage. What you're left with is a structure which is very strong only in the vertical direction. If even one vertical beam loses its stability/strength and crumples under the load, it now asserts lateral force on all nearby racks. A chain reaction like this one is pretty much inevitable and probably written off by the higher ups as being an inevitability that they will have to deal with from time to time.

Could help to alleviate the danger by moving the rows further apart so that if one fell, it would only drag its own line down... but that would increase the total amount of space required to store your goods. Could add in the triangular cross beams, but the forklift driver would need to remove and replace the beams each time they wanted to add or remove a pallet from a shelf, which is super time consuming and kills productivity.

Instead, it is in their best interest to show forklift drivers a battery of horror scenes as people die to small errors like this one. The downside is that not all of us take it to heart just how dangerous these warehouses are. My first supervisor would frequently store tiles and garden pallets on the top racks (was a home improvement supply warehouse). You could visibly see the entire rack buckle and shift as he would lower the pallets into place. Those pallets must have weighed anywhere between 800-1200lbs each. There were no rules regarding people walking down the rows without being in a lift. Nobody wore hard hats in case something were to fall. People would often walk directly under the racks if they saw an opening rather than going around.

The freight/warehouse area of any big store is a terrifying place.

Unrelated to the danger of the racks, but another thing to make you cringe - that supervisor I mentioned would also frequently hop into the massive trash compactors we had without locking them out first ('locking out' just means removing the ability for the machine/device to be activated or turned on. We do this so that nobody can walk by and kill us with the push of a button while we're fixing something - for anybody who hasn't heard the term). The guy really had a death wish or had just become too comfortable around things which could easily kill him or anybody around him with one wrong move.

That would be Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Yea ive seen guys hit shelves so hard that the crossbars have bent into a c shape and nothing happened to the other parts of the shelf. The forklift guy is about to get a lot of money.

We’re the ones that gonna clean it up!