BY PETER BRADLEY, EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
LIFT TRUCKS
materialhandlingupdate
Advanced safety equipment can
help, but the real key to reducing
lift-truck accidents lies in training
and enforcement.
get tough
on safety
THE LIFT TRUCK IS THE WORKHORSE OF
the distribution center, touching product
from receiving to putaway and picking
through loading onto the outbound trailer.
But as a piece of heavy equipment capable of
moving at high speeds and controlled by fallible human beings, the lift truck can also be
dangerous.
Forklift accidents remain one of the leading
causes of deaths and injury in U.S. work-
places, with an estimated 100 workers killed
and 20,000 injured each year.
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA) says on its Web site,
“Each year, tens of thousands of injuries relat-
ed to powered industrial trucks or forklifts,
occur in U.S. workplaces. Many employees are
injured when lift trucks are inadvertently
driven off loading docks, lifts fall between
docks and an unsecured trailer, they are
struck by a lift truck, or when they fall while
on elevated pallets and tines. Most incidents
also involve property damage, including dam-
age to overhead sprinklers, racking, pipes,
walls, and machinery.”
The result is a high cost in human suffering
and potentially enormous costs to companies
in worker compensation, lost productivity, lit-
igation, and damage to trucks, property, and
product. “This is important not only from a
moral standpoint but from a cost standpoint,”
says David Hoover, president of Newark,
Ohio-based Forklift Training Systems.
Human error
As for the cause of the problem, people
sometimes assume that faulty equipment is
to blame. But that’s rarely the case these days,
according to Hoover. “The issue of bad
equipment has by and large gone by the
boards,” he says.
In fact, Hoover says, recent technical
advances have made today’s lift trucks safer
than ever. He cites the examples of the tilt and
mast controls in Toyota’s three-wheel electric
truck lineup that reduce spilled loads and truck
turnovers, and Crown Equipment Corp.’s controls that prevent a truck from operating if a
driver’s foot is outside the cab area.
Even so, the problem persists. Why? In
OSHA’s view, the cause generally lies in
human error. On its Web site, the agency says:
“[M]ost employee injuries and property dam-
age can be attributed to lack of safe operating
procedures, lack of safety-rule enforcement,
and insufficient or inadequate training.”
Hoover agrees that poor training and lack
of enforcement are at the core of the prob-
lem. “I’ve seen a lot of training done poorly,”
he says. For one thing, he says, many of the
training programs available are generic,
without reference to specific equipment or
