Warehouse Safety: Top 8 Hazards and How to Deal with Them
Employees executing their activities inside of warehouses are exposed to a set of particular hazardous situations. Warehouse management systems are commonplace for engineers, chief operating officers and inventory controllers striving to implement health safety plans to prevent these situations to happen.
Dealing with emerging hazards and avert future accidents is one of the top priorities in the construction industry. In fact, is highest than any other field. Manufacturing, transportation and storage are the following industries with a great number of incidents and casualties.
Although there are various types of warehouses – distribution centre, private or climate-controlled – and they are not only used in the construction industry, there are recurring types of risks present in all of them. Here we mention 8 of the most frequent hazards and the corrective actions to be taken to prevent them.
Chemical Materials
For hazardous chemicals, there must be an assessment plan to store and control the transportation logistics, when they enter and leave the warehouse. In addition to transportation and logistics, the plan should consider the signalling of pedestrian paths and clearly define the routes forklifts and trucks follow to move the loads around.
The warehouse should be classified in areas to store different chemicals. For example, gas cylinders are put in a ventilated, dry and flat part of the warehouse, wherever external heat doesn鈥檛 reach them and away from the established routes for heavy machines and vehicles.
Gas cylinders or flammable liquids are only part of the frequently stored chemical materials. Other substances such as petrol, diesel fuel, cosmetic, cleaning and corrosive materials are as well considered in the risk assessment plan.
Moving Machine Parts
For warehouse constantly relocating moving items and heavy loads, machine operators are trained to be careful with pedestrians around them. However, there are plenty of blind spots for machinists and it is the responsibility of pedestrians to attentively carry on with their activities while operators work in the surrounding areas.
For this end, employees executing duties inside of warehouses with machines constantly moving are trained to anticipate dangers.
In other words, safety precautions and plans are implemented and reinforced for both machine operat