Risks Should Not Be Taken
This is Steven Petrick Posting.
We have made another transit to "the Gulag", gaining more space in the warehouse. We did two turns of the truck, mostly because while the truck probably would have held everything we had to take, we need to have space in the truck to use a pallet jack to move the pallets into position to for the lift gate to lower them.
We had two "moderate risk" moves (full sized pallets of which the load on one end was removed leaving the weight on the remaining end to ride the lift gate while the unloaded end was steadied by ground personnel), and one "high risk" move that all of us agree should NOT have been done. We had all come to the conclusion that the pallet should have been broken down in the truck (it had arrived already packed in the truck), but as the "Incident Report" would have said (had "failure" occurred, which thankfully it did not) "Supervision failed at all levels". (Worst case, the report would have said "The casualty occurred as a result of the failure of supervision at all levels.") The pallet was too big, and while the load was comparatively light, it was too much to risk moving the way it was moved.
Yes, we got it down, and "nobody died", and nothing was broken, but none of us should have allowed that maneuver to be made. All of us knew the correct thing to do was to break down that pallet, but we all stood by and let the truck driver maneuver that pallet into the high risk position, with none of saying stop, but each doing his part to try to keep the pallet under control as it made its way from the truck to the ground.
It was entirely possible that the pallet could have "gone over", and two of us might have had, at minimum broken legs (all four of them), at worse . . . death from fractured skulls as a result of being forced into uncontrolled backward falls to the pavement under the weight of the pallet.
NEVER EVER let a desire to avoid work (and that is what it came down to, none of us wanted to do the work to tear down and rebuild that pallet) make you risk your life. In the long run, it will become a habit that will get you badly injured, if not killed. Be safe, not just for yourself, but for those you are supervising.
We have made another transit to "the Gulag", gaining more space in the warehouse. We did two turns of the truck, mostly because while the truck probably would have held everything we had to take, we need to have space in the truck to use a pallet jack to move the pallets into position to for the lift gate to lower them.
We had two "moderate risk" moves (full sized pallets of which the load on one end was removed leaving the weight on the remaining end to ride the lift gate while the unloaded end was steadied by ground personnel), and one "high risk" move that all of us agree should NOT have been done. We had all come to the conclusion that the pallet should have been broken down in the truck (it had arrived already packed in the truck), but as the "Incident Report" would have said (had "failure" occurred, which thankfully it did not) "Supervision failed at all levels". (Worst case, the report would have said "The casualty occurred as a result of the failure of supervision at all levels.") The pallet was too big, and while the load was comparatively light, it was too much to risk moving the way it was moved.
Yes, we got it down, and "nobody died", and nothing was broken, but none of us should have allowed that maneuver to be made. All of us knew the correct thing to do was to break down that pallet, but we all stood by and let the truck driver maneuver that pallet into the high risk position, with none of saying stop, but each doing his part to try to keep the pallet under control as it made its way from the truck to the ground.
It was entirely possible that the pallet could have "gone over", and two of us might have had, at minimum broken legs (all four of them), at worse . . . death from fractured skulls as a result of being forced into uncontrolled backward falls to the pavement under the weight of the pallet.
NEVER EVER let a desire to avoid work (and that is what it came down to, none of us wanted to do the work to tear down and rebuild that pallet) make you risk your life. In the long run, it will become a habit that will get you badly injured, if not killed. Be safe, not just for yourself, but for those you are supervising.
posted by Federation Commander at 5:27 PM
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