As we head into the fall and eventually winter, we start to focus on keeping warm. Keeping the cold air from blowing through our doors. Keeping the temperature in that sweet spot of not too hot and not too cold. But what about water? Not just from fall rainstorms but from melting snow and ice.
We know. It’s September. Are we really talking about snow and ice? Yep. We are. Winter in the Midwest is hard. It can be brutal on your loading dock equipment and bottom line. It’s cold. It’s warm(ish). It’s sunny. It’s snowing. All of that can cause chaos with your loading dock equipment. Melting (and then refreezing) snow and ice pose serious safety concerns and performance problems at your loading docks. Safety Concerns Slippery docks are dangerous to your employees and visiting drivers alike. The potential for someone to slip and fall greatly increases if your docks are not properly sealed and water or ice is present. Forklifts going in and out of trailers will transfer water throughout your facility, creating even more chances for someone to slip and fall. This can lead to injuries, time off, workers comp – all of these can be avoided by paying closer attention to your loading dock and the potential for water infiltration. Compliance Concerns Ever smelled a stagnant swamp or bucket of water? Standing water can become a breeding ground for harmful bacteria. Bacteria poses numerous threats to the health of your staff and food facilities can be a major violation of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) requirements. FSMA requires you to have a food safety plan in place that includes an analysis of hazards and risk-based preventive controls to minimize or prevent the identified hazards. A pest infestation can be another violation, especially in food and pharma facilities. Any gaps in your seals or equipment can lead to issues with requirements and compliance. Performance Problems Have you ever tried to pry something off the ground that good ole’ Mr. Winter has frozen? Say your garbage can after it’s been sitting for a week with constant thaw and freeze. Not a whole lot of fun and sometimes an unsuccessful venture. Now imagine that at your loading docks. Imagine melted ice and snow working its way down into your metal loading docks and thawing and refreezing. Over and over again. Many repairs we perform during the winter could be prevented by properly maintained and sealed equipment. A nagging or small issue in July can become a big problem in December So, what should I do?
Check out our other blogs on facility modernization and safety for more ideas on how to improve your facility and your bottom line. As always, we hope you find this information useful and you find something that you can do in your facility to help prevent the winter blues. Please contact us with any questions or concerns. Safety hazards exist in every workplace – from the smallest office to the biggest warehouse. Heavy machinery, distracted walking, water on the floor, heavy traffic areas, etc. Slips, trips, and falls are a major source of preventable injuries and deaths in the workplace; only motor vehicle incidents cause more worker fatalities. The loading dock area, in particular, is ripe with potential dangers. Since safety measures come in all shapes, sizes, and forms, what can you as an employer do to make your facility as safe as it can be for yourself, your employees, and visitors? Let’s look at each situation and how you can help prevent injury and equipment damage. Slips
Things like water on your dock from a leaky dock seal or rain shelter is an easy opportunity for someone to slip and end up in one of the situations above. Especially without the proper fall protection or safety training – but more on that later. Slip Prevention Routinely checking your dock seals for rips, tears, blowouts and other damage can help ensure that they form a proper seal when a truck comes in during inclement weather. Replacing them when they do leak is another preventative measure you can take. Things like barrel fans or dock fans can help dry out wet puddles or slick spots as well. HVLS fans can also help combat condensation and moisture build-up throughout your facility. Rain shelters are another excellent way of sealing up the opening when a truck is in position. They also help keep out all the runoff from the roof and the rain coming down and penetrating the seal even without a truck in position. This also applies to winter – we know it’s June – but snow and ice can cause just as much if not more water ingress into your building as rain. Melt and runoff from trailers, steps, your parking lot, all bring water into your facility. Proper dock seals and canopies can help relieve some of this at your loading dock. Water absorbing mats and fans can help keep your floor dry. Trips
Falls
Common sense and a little patience can eliminate many fall hazards. Unfortunately in today’s rush rush world, we often set aside common sense in the interest of getting it done now. How many times have you yourself used something sketchy or maybe just a bit on the dangerous side to climb up because it was close and you didn’t want to wait for the proper ladder to get there? Have you ever seen racking scaled to get to something that should be gotten to with a lift but it’s on the other side of the warehouse and we need it now? How many times have our workers jumped out of the loading dock to the ground instead of walking to exit to take the stairs? Fall Protection
We talked about fall protection in our blog Hazard Recognition – 3 commonly overlooked serious situations and it is a serious problem. In fact, it’s one of OSHA’s Top 10 violations (see here, Fall Protection – Top 10 on OSHA’s violation list, for the remaining 9 – and notice that fall protection training is in there too). Fall protection at your loading dock can be as simple as having enough of the right size and capacity ladders to installing safety netting or gates to adding truck restraints at every dock position. There are so many options to fit every situation, every need, and every budget, it’s a no-brainer to investigate what you can do to ensure your safety, the safety of your employees, and protect your equipment and products. Employee Training Proper training is crucial for the prevention of slips, trips, and falls. This includes equipment training for all employees, common-sense procedures, regular and thorough general housekeeping, and policies that enforce and enhance your safety practices. The old adage: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure most certainly applies. The NSC’s Make Fall Safety a Top Priority article has some very simple and great tips for fall protection. How can we help? As always, we hope this has given you some helpful information, as well as some things to consider checking or adding to your facility to improve your safety systems. We are here to help if you have any concerns or questions please Contact Us today for a no-obligation safety and OSHA compliance check. We see hazards every day in our personal lives – the texting driver, the kid running across the street, the unsecured cargo in the back of a pickup. But do we see the hazards at our warehouse? Or have we gotten so used to things just working that we don’t see the dangers they pose if they don’t?
About 25% of all industrial accidents happen at the loading dock. For each reported accident there are as many as 600 near misses…that’s a scary number. Forklifts, pedestrians, debris and other hazards, faulty equipment, human error, and countless other reasons are to blame. Many of these can be avoided by developing and enforcing clear and comprehensive safety practices, providing top-notch employee safety training, and repairing or replacing old or faulty loading dock equipment. As we visit our clients the most common hazards we see are: 1. No truck restraints or wheel chocks at all loading docks Lack of truck restraints, be it wheel chocks or mechanical restraints, can cause a multitude of very serious problems; trailer creep being the biggest and scariest of them. Trailer creep is when the trailer of the truck “creeps” away from the dock. This can cause separation between the dock lip and the trailer itself. Once that separation gets big enough the weight and constant back and forth motion of the forklift could cause the lip to fall down or break, taking the forklift and the driver with it. This could result in serious injury or death and major equipment damage. Impatient drivers or unclear communication between drivers and dock workers can cause early truck departure – resulting in the same situation or worse. Wheel chocks can certainly help but are not always the best choice. They have drawbacks that can make them an unreliable means of securing a trailer in your dock. But they are better than nothing. If you are using wheel chocks only, make sure to train your staff on how to properly use them and how to safely and effectively communicate with your truck drivers. You also need to have a process in place for inspecting your chocks and assessing their condition so you know when its time to replace them. Broken, missing, or misused wheel chocks are as bad as not having any at all. Check out the articles below for some basic information and facts on loading dock safety and the crucial role that vehicle restraints can play. Prevent Trailer / Dock Separation Incidents (MH&L) Stay Safe: 8 Tips to Ensure Loading Dock Safety (Load Delivered) 5 Loading Dock Catastrophes (and How to Prevent Them) (safeopedia) 2. Missing or improper entrapment devices on doors As the name states these devices prevent someone from becoming entrapped under your door. Overhead door systems are frequently overlooked as safety hazards, even in companies with excellent safety programs. Quite simply, if they are working, we kind of forget about them. Commercial doors are heavy, many hang high in the air, and in the interest of efficiency can operate quickly. Besides being an OSHA safety violation, missing or improper entrapment devices is an opportunity for a serious accident to occur. A person or even a forklift can easily get trapped under a door that isn’t set up correctly to prevent entrapment. There are different options and different devices that can prevent this from happening, depending on how your facility and equipment are set up and used. The proper entrapment devices can save thousands in equipment damage and prevent a serious injury from happening. 3. Missing fall protection This is a commonly overlooked safety component because we usually don’t see the docks empty and the doors open. But what about those beautiful spring & summer days when you open the doors to let a nice breeze in. What protects your employees and equipment then? While it may be a simple thing to ignore, OSHA standard 29 CFR 1910.23(b) relating to protection for wall openings and holes requires fall protection for openings where there is a drop of 48″ or more. We recommend fall protection wherever you have an opening that a forklift, person, or other equipment could fall from and cause injury. As with most things, there is a wide variety of fall protection equipment available depending on your facility, your budget, and the frequency of use. OSHA Requirements Many times we reference OSHA standards in our industry and while it is a great tool and great organization, we consider their requirements to be the bare minimum. Your facility and your industry may have standards that far exceed the OSHA requirements and that is a very good thing. Make sure when laying out your safety plans or adding safety equipment that you take into consideration how it will be used, what equipment is going to be affected by it, and how your employees can easily and safely implement your safety practices. Keep the bare minimum in mind, but plan and build for the reality of your situation. We hope this has given you some helpful information, as well as some things to consider checking or adding to your facility to improve your safety systems. Check out our other blogs on Loading Dock Safety and Risk Assessment for more helpful tips. We are here to help if you have any concerns or questions please Contact Us today for a no-obligation safety and OSHA compliance check Stump-out? Like the chemical that is used to get rid of unwanted tree stumps? What does that have to do with loading dock equipment? No, we’re not talking about that kind of stump-out. In the loading dock industry stump-out is an all too common problem and huge cost of ownership with mechanical dock levelers that can wreak havoc and create a hazardous work area.
What is it? Ironically enough, stump-out is caused by pieces of the dock meant to keep it safe. Stump-out occurs on mechanical dock levelers when the mechanical fall safe legs contact their stops. The legs then interfere with the vertical movement of a dock leveler that naturally occurs during loading and unloading. Stump-out can also occur when mechanical fall safe legs can be manually released by pulling a release activator in the dock leveler deck assembly. The release is required every time the dock leveler must pass the below the stop position of the mechanical fall safe legs. Upward movement during use can cause the safety leg to reset to the stored position. How do I know if I have stump-out? Take a look at your dock while it’s in use. Does it look like this? Do your forklift drivers complain about big bumps or jarring stops going in and out of trucks? Do your forklifts have tire damage that isn’t normal wear and tear? Does your product ever take a spill off pallets while being loaded or unloaded? If so, you probably have a stump-out situation happening. The consequences No matter how it happens, stump-out creates a steep incline of the lip. That, in turn, causes any lift truck to be severely jarred or stopped completely when trying to exit a truck, causing possible injury to the driver or damage to any product being moved, the lift truck, or the leveler itself. While there are designs and versions of mechanical fall safe legs that can remain retracted until they are required, they do not always activate like they should. Many times they are activated by lip rotation or speed sensing. Rollers and spring-loaded cross-traffic legs do not solve the stump out problem and add to the cost of ownership. They are high failure rate parts and are in constant danger and motion during loading and unloading. All of which will cost you time and money. Lots of time and money. In some cases, there are as many as 20-30 parts for EACH mechanical fall safe leg that can fail. Over and over again. With some of our own clients, we have seen repair bills that would have covered the difference of purchasing a hydraulic leveler in the first place. And would have more than covered the cost of a hydraulic conversion. Stump-out also poses a major safety risk to your employees. Constant jarring and sudden stops can cause back and neck injuries. In turn, costing you downtime due to injury and potential worker’s compensation claims. As well as employee safety, what about your equipment? The jarring and sudden stops cause repeated damage to your forklifts and other equipment that will all-cause premature wear and tear. Meaning you will need more maintenance and sooner replacement. All causing you downtime and efficiency deficiency. How to fix it? Instead of throwing parts and money away trying to fix a problem that will keep happening no matter how good your service team is, address the problem head-on. Most loading dock companies are representing a single manufacturer and have a very limited number of solutions. As an independent loading dock service & repair company, we have options that work for all situations. We will assess your situation and work with our partners to design a solution that works for your facility and your budget. For more information, contact us and we will provide a solution for this potentially costly and hazardous problem. Now that the groundhog has gifted us with another six weeks of winter it’s time to sit back, enjoy a warm beverage, and write a quick note to our loyal customers.
Over the past several months I’ve encountered many people who have been frustrated after buying from vendors who lock them into systems that can only be sold and serviced by one company. These organizations use a pitch that highlights uniformity in the solution. The only solution these frustrated people have witnessed is a growth in the financial demands of the vendor they chose. These “customers” can typically get a great deal from the start but it quickly turns into a nightmare as service calls and replacement parts come at an ultra-premium. The vendor knows they control the show. The good people who purchased or inherited these products feel burnt and don’t always know how to look for a good solution partner to help them achieve their goals with the best value in mind. Feeling the pain and frustration these people bear is a big motivational factor in me striving to accelerate my business. I believe that building long term business partnerships stems from following the golden rule. My definition of the golden rule in business is consulting with integrity, delivering a master-crafted solution, and keeping a fair commitment to delivering value-added service. Our clients remain loyal because we at DDT live and breathe this through our companies mission, values, and vision. In the coming months, I’m going to be sharing stories about these clients in this newsletter series. You’ll discover how people just like you have innovated their loading docks with the right solutions for their needs. You’ll hear why these clients turned partners believe in our commitment to excellence. Most importantly, you’ll understand that DDT adds value through our lifetime commitment to our craftsmanship and maintenance programs. Thank you for your time and I look forward to sharing these customer stories in the very near future. Jay Anderson Owner, Dock & Door Tec |
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