Forklift Safety – Glad No One Was Hurt

Earlier in my career, among many other duties, I was the main forklift operator at the local repair facility of a national truck rental company. OSHA was not as established as it is today, and I am not proud to admit that some of the things I did lacked common sense. Lifting 4,000+ pounds of plywood with a 3,000 pound capacity forklift, with two of my co-workers as counter weights, was a common practice. We didn’t have the right tool for the right job. That, of course, is no excuse not to be safe. Luckily, no one ever sustained an injury. Dumb luck is sometimes amazing.

Below is a video that shows how not to operate a forklift in a warehouse (it gets interesting right around the 20 second mark).

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 7:45 am and is filed under Workplace Compliance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.