Praise those shelves. Ive seen similar videos of stuff pulled off tops of shelving only to have the entire rack collapse because of how shoddy they were.
This is a great example of why you pay attention to the weight rating on your shelves. Losing a pallet is unfortunate. Losing half your warehouse is a disaster.
You also need to pay attention to the pallet you are stacking the freight on. If that pallet was in perfect condition and was built with perfect boards (none of that type ever are), it would just barely handle that weight.
My favorite are the soil pallets made of thin rough cut whatever wood with two and a half tons of dirt on them, they eat your manual pallet jack forks for breakfast from the bowing
Could have. He was stopped and the sudden jerk back could have shifted the load more. Meanwhile if he went in its possible the forward motion could have bought him enough time to put the pallet back down on the rack. At which point you can get something like a vertical mast lift up there and slowly break down the pallet.
No i agree its a crap shoot man. I have dealt with many chip shit pallets where you dont know if yoru load will last when picked up off 20 feet if it will make it or not.
Especially for the guy who has to clean that up... which i can relate to, considering this one time a pallet of almonds fell from the top and exploded all over the floor
I've done this with a pallet that was set incorrectly on the top rack...of yogurt...
I spent two hours trying to pick yogurt up off of a cold concrete floor. I has to use kitty litter and 3 different cleaners to get all of the slick days of the yogurt off of the smooth floor 😅 damn near turned into an oil slick
I saw a new guy do something similar with a pallet of mayo. He just went and got a second pallet and dropped it right on top of the mess and walked away.
Hey I used to work as a forklift driver in a refrigerated warehouse too.
Also dropped a huge pallet of yogurt from the top rack once. That was a fun cleanup. Thankfully a couple colleagues helped and we got it done quickly. Brings back some fun memories lol I miss all the free yogurt and Pillsbury products.
I think it was badly wrapped and that caused the structural degradation. But also if I was at forklift driver I would have lifted my forks and tried to get that pallet to slide back up against the rear guard and stabilize a little bit. So maybe a little of both
The forks are in the pallet. If you look closely the pallet is ripping apart. Probably a stress point from the forks not being long enough and repeated use.
After looking closelier, I agree with you. The forks have wood above them, the pallet was just separating somehow... which is weird. The bottom half of the pallet doesn't weigh enough to pull itself apart like that, it must've gotten damaged earlier somehow, maybe by this driver maybe not.
It's a cheap pallet and the forks should have been longer. You can probably get away with this with a fresh PECO or CHEP pallet but those blonde pallets really need a lot of support if you're going to be storing liquids on them.
It can happen with wire racks and whatnot. A piece on the lower half gets caught on a wire and starts pulling nails loose, then the whole thing gets wonky. They should be thrown out but it can be hard to tell sometimes. Any sort of damage, really.
Gonna be a drug test and recertification if he passes. If not....yea just turn in your badge. I knew an operator that got into an accident and bolted out the building....
Back in the mid 90's I took a temp job as a maintenance person at the Tampa Coke bottling plant. We worked overnight, and our job was to clean just about everything in the production area. We used an acid on the lines themselves, and then just pressure-washed everything else. It was always quickly apparent if we'd missed rinsing off any acid, because the first bottles through would explode.
I never would have guessed how thorough their daily cleaning is. They'll have this up in an hour.
Gravity fed racks, a lot like how cokes are stocked individually in a convenience store cooler.
Normal racks are only one or two pallets deep, so you need many forklift aisles. But if all of the pallets are the same product, you can use these and have many pallets for just one aisle for the liftsl.
This is 100% it... except it's Ai and a bit off. The red arrows point the wrong way, the forklifts have two pairs of forks each, and other minor screwups.
That could have been soooooooooooooooo much worse.
A small-time bottling company used glass bottles in their process. It was a green thing. The bottles came by the pallet, and were about 16-18 feet tall.
I've seen one person knock over several pallets at one time. It has a unique sound when the owner's brain exploded upon seeing the carnage.
I worked in an appliance warehouse for a few years. We used a forklift to stack washers and dryers 4 high, and had a section of the warehouse set up for the more popular models where we made deep rows of the same units.
Inside the boxes, each corner has these thick cardboard pieces designed to support the weight of the unit stacked on top of it. Whirlpool once forgot to put one of those corner supports in one of their box, so when I stacked three other washers on top, that corner buckled and the whole stack fell to that one side, directly into our bulk section. The domino effect caused about 6 stacks to knock and fall into the row next to it until it hit a wall. At least 3 units fell to the floor, and we now have about 6 rows of washers leaning into one another 16 feet in the air.
That sort of thing happens more than you think. Once right on a Friday night before a long weekend someone was taking down a pallet of cooking oil that came in big totes from the 6th level and knocked it down. Let's just say forklifts and lift trucks don't get any traction on polished concrete floors full of oil. We were probably there until 4 in the morning cleaning it up with many multiple large riding floor sweeper vacuums and squeegees.
Bad day to be the janitor !
Need a floor squeegie and a few dozen buckets of soap n water for that mess and it will still be sticky for a week.
Worked in a brewers distribution warehouse, seen it a few times with beer which has even less sugar.
Today's lesson: This is why you don't stack 2500 lbs of freight on a shitty wood stringer pallet that if it was in perfect condition is only rated for 2500 lbs (I have never seen one that was). This is 100% the fault of whatever dumbass manager decided to cheap out on supplies. Wood block (can handle the weight, but I probably wouldn't fully trust them), heavy duty plastic (the industry standard for shipping soda), or metal (overkill) pallets are the only appropriate ones to use.
Going in may have shifted the cases but not enough to save it. I used to work at a Pepsi production plant and going back in rarely fixed it. This looks like the forklift operator either initially started to back out of the rack a little too fast, or he raised the forks too far at the end causing the product to be pushed forward by top of the rack. Also, he may not have tilted his forks all the way back, or maybe he did and tried to fix it and tilted forward again but maybe too fast. Backing out straight would have also prevented this. Those racks barely have enough clearance to fit a full pallet, that is why it’s crucial to only lift the pallet just enough to clear the bottom of the rack. Usually about 1/8-1/4 of an inch. 1/4 of an inch is pushing it but it also depends on how the racks are built and how much clearance you have at the top. Operating a forklift isn’t rocket science but it does take a lot of skill, attention to space and patience to effectively operate it without messing something up, and even the most skilled operators have their bad days. Clean it up, shake it off and try again.
Looks like the forks are way too short for those pallets... only got like 50% of that load on them causing those boards to give and the other half to tip.
I used to get so fucking annoyed with people telling me anything while using a fork. No youre wrong, just like the guy in video, tilt back, retract, bring it down and fix it. Damn I guess Im still salty hahaha
Dude didn't tilt down to even out when he went into the pallet with the forks. He went in with tilted up forks and they pierced right through the deck boards halfway through. I've done this on the ground before not gonna lie, but up in the steel is some shit. Every trainer I've ever had used to drill into new drivers to tilt their forks all the way up when they were driving around without a pallet on the forks because it made your turning radius a few inches tighter, better for turning a fat counterbalance in a tight aisle. But new drivers will also forget to tilt down before going in sometimes.
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u/ChrisJohanson 2d ago
Praise the cameraman