on a truck like that, “backing” is actually travelling forks-first. the driver’s position is perpendicular to the direction of travel.
that said, those racks were clearly way under-spec for the load on them. when I drove a similar vehicle, we were told to make very certain that we did not clip the racking, but there were plenty of scratches on both vehicle cages and shelves showing where contact had been made. somebody needs to be sued into oblivion/jailed for gross negligence… though in the current global climate, I think it’s more likely that the driver is the one facing suit, rather than the [CENSORED] who cheaped out on the construction of the warehouse.
I don’t think that’s the same event - the racking in the original one is grey with all cross-beams at a 45 degree angle in alternating directions, and has only plain brown boxes on it, the one you’ve posted has blue racks with every other crossbeam horizontal, the sloped ones all in the same direction, and has a much larger variety of boxes in the collapsed shelving.
Oh shit. The kicker: I saw the headline and thought, “Oh yeah, I just saw part of this video recently.” Except it’s clearly not the same video, nor it appears, the same warehouse. So now I’m wondering how often this happens and I’m extra disturbed.
Yeah, I think that was the video I saw a bit of recently. It’s a little more understandable, given how the driver pretty solidly smashed into a corner at some speed, and only the two shelves come down. Whereas this newer one, where a glancing blow destroys the entire warehouse, seems a lot more like something that should never, ever have happened. So I’d hope they’d have figured out what went wrong!
The other question this raises for me is how they got everything onto those racks in the first place. Seems like the logistics of loading those pallets onto the highest shelves, especially, would be extremely difficult in a confined space where literally any wrong move is sufficient to destroy the entire works.
Yeah, well, I didn’t say the source I had was right.
Another source staid Netherlands, which seems equally unlikely (would expect better safety regs there as well as in USA).
I also have always seen much heavier shelving used where fork loads were stored. I currently work assembling generator sets for Cummins… our shelves are both much more heavily built, and have heavy bolted footing gaurds.
I know what you’re saying; I thought the colour difference might be due to the camera. For some reason, cameras recording high value assets always appear to be of low quality. The boxes on the left hand side of the facility where the shelves did not collapse appear to be the same. The boxes on the shelves that did collapse appear to have broken open revealing smaller packages. But yeah, I’m not too confident it is the same incident.
Update: Looks like everyone was ok in the end. Thanks, David_Guilbeaul!
Wellll, given that the date stamp in the video is 2017, and that story is from 2016 AND appears to be a different warehouse, I am not sure it supports that conclusion.
Given that the Thistle Systems link seems to use the video as marketing, is it possible it was faked? Seemed a bit odd that with all that mass shifting that the camera didn’t even jiggle a little bit.
(I had been thinking maybe an earthquake but that doesn’t seem likely either.)
