Description
This course provides a brief introduction to the hazards of forklift operations
in the industrial warehouse environment, including the various hazard types, accident frequency, and possible ways to improve safety.
Course Outline:
1. Introductory Comments
2. Bostelman White Paper
– 2.1 Forklift Safety Statistics and Issues
– 2.2 Safety Approaches & Systems
– 2.3 Industry Comments
Forklifts are an essential tool in most warehouse and industrial production facilities.
Typically they transport parts from a storage or warehouse facility to the production area in large quantities in order to keep the production lines well supplied. They are also used to move finished product from the production area, either directly to the shipping dock, or into a product storage area to await later shipment. There is scarcely any physical product industry where forklifts are not used in some aspect of the material handling.
At the same time, forklifts are driven by a wide variety of personnel, ranging from the highly trained man who does this every day to the new hire that just started yesterday. They
operate in a wide variety of environments,from the brightly lit production area to the dimly
lit (or even completely dark) warehouse, often moving back and forth so rapidly that the operators have little time for their vision to adjust to the changed lighting conditions.
All of this simply points to the likelihood of accidents involving this versatile and powerful tool of material handling. The balance of this course is drawn from a White Paper by Roger
Bostelman of NIST in which he reports the result of a meeting on Forklift Safety under the title, “Towards Improved Forklift Safety,”
http://www.nist.gov/customcf/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=904217
- Develop an appreciation for the scope of the forklift safely problem;
- Develop an understanding of the hazards that surround forklift operations;
- Understand the inadequacy of existing safety measures;
- Understand the hazard of pedestrians in a workplace shared with forklift operations;
- Acquire a variety of options to improve forklift safety;
- Learn about safety approaches currently implemented in some major companies.