At McCue, we know what it means to keep warehouses safe. With our range of guardrails, bollards and rack end guards and guards, we offer solutions to help you meet OSHA standards for shelf and warehouse security in distribution centers. Ideally, only wooden block pallets and pallets made of sturdy alternative materials such as plastic and metal should be stored on pallet racks. Low-cost spar pallets are thinner and become unreliable after a few trips through the supply chain. While OSHA has no problem storing spar pallets on shelves, if a pallet failure on a shelf results in injury, it can. High-quality plastic pallets can support more weight than wood block pallets or spar pallets and can be the best way to keep employees safe and avoid problems with OSHA. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has issued citations for workplaces that don`t properly anchor pallet racking, resulting in structural failure — and it`s likely they will continue to do so. However, OSHA`s pallet rack anchorage requirements are not among the clearest regulations on the books. At least two OSHA rules can be applied to citations of workplaces where pallet racking cannot be anchored, and they are both fairly general.
The most common reasons OSHA cites companies for their pallet racking are related to basic installation, maintenance, and repair issues. While OSHA does not have specific safety guidelines for warehouse racking, they fall under the general clause of the Occupational Health and Safety Act that created the agency, which simply states that each employer must provide a workplace free of recognized hazards. In other words, if your pallet racking equipment is not installed properly or presents an obvious danger, you could be violating OSHA regulations and fined. OSHA has consistently fined companies for their pallet racking for the following reasons: These three standards address some of the most common concerns about pallet racking and storage, as well as the operating space required to safely operate forklifts. Failure to follow these protocols can result in injury and even death. OSHA regulations keep these risks at bay, allowing you and your employees to work in a safe environment. Since warehouses are one of the most dangerous workplaces, one would expect OSHA to have detailed guidelines for the safe operation and use of warehouse equipment. The truth is, when it comes to safety guidelines for warehouse racking, OSHA doesn`t offer much guidance. There are only two applicable rules: 1910.176(b), which effectively states that equipment stored in levels must be made safe, and 1910.159, which covers sprinklers and essentially requires a distance of 18 inches between the rack and the sprinkler. These OSHA guidelines may be vague, but if you follow reasonable basic principles and follow a maintenance schedule, you can be sure that your warehouse meets OSHA regulations. In addition to the exposure of workers to the risks and the penalties that may be imposed during an OSHA inspection, the actual amount of the penalty may be rather insignificant compared to the mitigation costs an employer may incur.
If shelves have been neglected for an extended period of time, the cost and time required to repair and replace large quantities of damaged shelves, as well as disruptions that would result in operations, are likely to be significant. From a safety, efficiency and economic perspective, employers whose activities include warehousing or distribution activities should therefore develop a protocol for inspection, reporting and repair of shelving to ensure that shelves are continuously maintained in a safe state in real time. Instead of formulating shelving requirements in a specific regulation, OSHA instead uses the general mandatory clause in Section 5(a)(1) of the Occupational Health and Safety Act as a mechanism for enforcing defects and ray-related hazards. Therefore, it is important for employers who use tablets to understand what these hazards are in order to train employees to recognize them and better manage and eliminate them in the workplace. The standards set by the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) for building shelving aim to promote a safe working environment. Poor governance, improper stacking, and shelving can be a huge burden on your business if it leads to an accident. If your facility doesn`t comply with OSHA regulations, you may risk a fine or worse. While it is certainly debatable whether the general mandatory clause instead of OSHA performs the administrative rule-making process required to enact specific regulatory requirements, this debate is beyond the scope of this article. For the purposes of this study, employers should instead take note of the most common types of violations identified by OSHA through the general duty clause for tablet hazards.
Employers should also be aware that OSHA sometimes identifies ANSI standards such as MH16.1-2008 “Specification for the Design, Testing and Use of Industrial Steel Storage Racks” as a reference point for compliance with exhaust gas cleaning and guidelines for inspecting and maintaining the integrity of racking systems. Employers who perform warehousing and distribution operations would do well to familiarize themselves with this ANSI standard (and relevant updates and changes) and develop a rack inspection and repair protocol based on its principles. In October 2018, OSHA Region 2 (NY, NJ, Puerto Rico) and Region 9 (AZ, CA, HI, NV, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands) adopted Regional Accent Programs (“REPs”) for warehousing, warehousing and distribution. EPRs have an initial validity period of up to five years (2023), which likely means that a good number of warehouse inspections will be conducted during this period. While EPRs focus primarily on enforcing regulations for motorized industrial trucks and industrial trucks, they also target unsafe practices and inadequate training on hazards associated with standing and falling equipment and vehicles, stacked pallets and products, injuries struck or between injuries. are associated with non-booby-trapped trailers, leakage problems and firefighting. Strangely, EPRs do not directly mention perhaps one of the most obvious links to almost all of these hazards and the only device that can be ubiquitous in target industries – warehouse racking and storage tank systems. It seems almost impossible for OSHA to perform an EPR inspection of the hazards anticipated in a warehouse operation without observing a significant amount of pallet racking. And, of course, even occasional sightings of damaged or defective shelves create the possibility of violations being found and cited under the “plain sight” exception.
How can the iGPS plastic pallet pooling system reduce your carbon emissions? 29 of the Code of Federal Regulations Standard 1910.176 covers the handling and storage of materials in general. Paragraph (b) of this standard simply states that “the storage of materials shall not present a hazard.” This common language can be applied to unsecured pallet racking. However, the standard does not specify how facilities must ensure that their storage tank systems are hazard-free. Perhaps the most common violation of shelves results from the continued use of shelves with damaged or twisted studs, vertical columns or crosspieces. Section 1.4.9 of the ANSI Standard above purportedly recommends that racks with visible damage be immediately unloaded, decommissioned, and properly repaired before being returned to service. However, the updated 2012 version of section 1.4.9 goes even further and requires a design professional to certify that the repair will restore the system to its original design capability. Without the adoption of a specific OSHA regulation or reference to an ANSI standard, it will not be clear to employers what OSHA expects or requires. Some plastic pallets are equipped with GS1-compliant tracking capabilities via built-in barcodes or RFID transmitters. Now, OSHA may not have mentioned pallet racking in the PWRs because OSHA does not have exactly a specific standard for pallet racking under the “Materials Handling and Storage” regulation in Part N of 29 C.F.R. 1910. The most potentially relevant standards appear to be: 1910.176(a) for the use of corridors and passageways; 1910.176(b) with the general requirement for the safe storage of materials; 1910.176(c) and 1910.22(a)(1) on housekeeping in corridors and corridors; protection against falling and falling objects under 1910.28; and 1910.159(c)(10), which require a distance of at least 18 inches between the firefighting sprinklers and the underlying “material” (i.e., the bottled product).