EARLIER THIS WEEK I WAS ALERTED TO A TENSE SITUATION THAT BEGAN WHEN A FORKLIFT OPERATOR SLAMMED INTO A PALLET RACK FRAME (THE VERTICAL MEMBER OF A PALLET RACK STRUCTURE.)
I stopped what I was doing to visit the site immediately and offer our assistance. When I arrived I witnessed the nearest thing to a collapse I’ve ever laid eyes on. The structure had buckled and cropped to the floor, leaving it standing but very crippled. I contacted a pair of technicians at our facility and in no time they gathered up two of our tower jacks and headed to the site to begin the process of engaging the damaged structure and relieving the stress on it. For now, the threat of a full collapse had been avoided. It had been a successful deployment of our equipment.
This type of damage is not very common. While these structures are engineered to take a hard hit, they don’t often sustain damage to this extent. In my 13 years of evaluating these structures, I have never seen one so buckled and broken. I have seen plenty of videos over the years where the system collapses under these forces. The structures are typically installed in parallel lines, so when they fall over, it is much like watching domino’s fall, but much more violent! During such a calamity lives can be lost and millions of dollars in damage can be sustained in literally seconds.
But this is not the real threat that’s common in many facilities. The real threat is the unattended pallet rack—those not routinely inspected by qualified individuals who are properly trained in pallet rack damage assessment. The danger in these environments is the complacency that accompanies unattended racks. When a system is hit enough to deform the structure, whether mildly or mightily, it introduces a stress riser into the geometry of the overall structure. When this happens repeatedly, the stress risers increase, and before long one more bump will cause the stress to be released and the entire structure to buckle and lay down. Often the trigger is just the last straw, not the initial event that caused the collapse. The collapse is often imminent due to the neglect of the structure.
Addressing Pallet Rack Structure Damage
In the United States, in spite of the regulations businesses have to comply with, there is very little that addresses pallet rack structure damage. In Canada and many European countries it is an act of negligence to allow these structures to fall into disrepair. People are routinely sent to prison for not maintaining the structures that they are responsible for. While I am not suggesting more regulations on business, there is a cultural difference. The current system does not require the same accountability here as it does in other economies.
We at MTAC Industrial Solutions have been working alongside our vendor and partner Mac Rak to bring timely, sturdy, engineered solutions to this challenge for year,. We offer a PM program to our clients to help maintain their structures. We will travel to client’s facilities from coast to coast, gathering and sharing the data from our latest damage assessments. Then we work with Mac Rak to quote the engineered steel repair kits for each different damage location. Once a PO is provided, we order the repair kits and Mac Rak produces US-made solid steel repair kits with a 20+ year track record of safety performance.
Once shipped to the site, our team of trained service technicians return to the site to install each kit using our procedures and protocols. We deploy a series of jack systems, many we personally pioneered to minimize the need for operations to be involved in unloading or loading their goods from the racks. While there are certain situations that do require operations to be involved, we prefer to minimize their role in our efforts. A typical repair can be completed in an hour or less. a damaged upright can take a half-day to a full day of effort by a team of capable people. The savings of time and money is obvious.
Whenever we arrive at a new facility to our program, to perform our baseline data gathering tasks, we are assured by our contact that there are “just a few” hits in the aisles only to find that we have 10’s or even 100’s of locations throughout their facility that are out of spec. Once we complete the damage assessment, we share a summary of our findings with that same contact and are often met with disbelief that their system is in such poor condition. We move onto the pricing and repairing phase promptly so we can all get safety issues in the rearview mirror. Our quarterly visits to a site helps keep the system in good working order and can help avoid the large quantities of damaged uprights that often begin our process at a given facility.
Repair, Repair, Repair!
So what of our near-collapse as documented in this blog? Within the week, we’ve already quoted the repairs to the client and once we get the greenlight, Mac Rak will expedite the order through its manufacturing process. In a week or so, this will all be in our rearview mirror. Exhale! But don’t forget, this is not what keeps me up at night- it’s the unattended structures that worry me most!
If you would like to schedule a site visit for a baseline damage assessment, please let us know. We would be happy to assist you in keeping your structures sturdy and standing.