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In addition to meeting the basic safety requirements outlined by OSHA, you can take other precautions to improve safety in your warehouse. Consider adding rack guards, which keep people safer in your facility and protect your infrastructure and inventory.

Discover the many benefits of these safety features and find out why you should install them right away.

Provide a Safer Place for People to Stand

Bringing pedestrian and forklift traffic together in a warehouse environment raises the risk of workplace injuries and infrastructure damage. While you can draft rules of safe conduct, accidents can still happen.

When you place guards at the ends of each inventory rack, you'll create a small space that forklifts can't reach. Pedestrians can step into these protected spots when they see a forklift headed their way. They can also use these areas while conducting cycle counts or performing other tasks that don't require dedicated workspaces.

Protect Against Impacts With Storage Racks

Turns are tricky maneuvers for forklifts to attempt, and even the most experienced driver can cut a corner too sharply and knock down an inventory rack. While direct impacts cause significant damage, a glancing blow during a sharp turn can do plenty of harm.

Depending on the speed and angle of the forklift, a seemingly minor accident can overturn an entire row of racking and products, potentially leading to employee injuries or worse.

When you install rack guards, you'll prevent most of these types of accidents. The guards are strong enough to prevent or reduce the impact. Most of the time, bumping the guard will give the driver enough of a warning to prompt them to brake the vehicle in time to avoid a collision with the rack.

Even when the driver doesn't brake, hitting the guard will help buffer or prevent a collision with the structure.

Give Forklift Drivers Visual Cues

Even with a maximum speed of only 10 miles per hour, a forklift can seem to travel considerably faster.

People, products, and racks can become a blur of colors to a driver when they feel rushed to complete an order, and it's not uncommon for the operator to miss a turn or lose track of their location in this situation. Additionally, other employees impeding the flow of forklift traffic can reduce efficiency.

Placing yellow guards around the ends of each row will help the driver differentiate between them at a greater distance. Along with other location indicators, rack guards help drivers track their routes with greater accuracy, which is especially helpful in large warehouses with dozens of indistinct rows of products.

Reduce the Risks of Collapsing Racks

Professional inventory rack installation will result in sturdy racks that stand the test of time. However, structures that repeatedly suffer forklift impacts on the same end will ultimately deteriorate. The force of these collisions will wear away the concrete around the bolts, and in time, the rack will become loose on the affected end and collapse.

The greatest benefit of rack guards is that they prevent repeated impacts and significantly reduce damage to your warehouse. These guards absorb the force of forklift strikes, blocking them from uprooting the bolts that secure the racks to the warehouse floor.

Replacing collapsed racks and discarding damaged products can result in significant financial losses. Reinstalling a rack guard incurs a much lower cost.

Keep Debris Out of the Way

A scrap of wood or other small matter can cause a major accident in any warehouse. Forklifts don't have the same kind of suspensions as cars and trucks do, which means that the driver feels stronger vibrations when running over debris. If the object is large enough, it can disrupt the forklift's maneuverability or cause it to tip.

Placing guards at the ends of each rack will keep debris under these structures from being pushed into the flow of traffic. Additionally, the space between the guard and the rack provides a temporary place to move this matter when it impedes safety.

Adding an extra buffer between the guards and the racks minimizes the factors that can lead to accidents.

Install Rack Guards to Complete Your Safety Guardrail System

When searching for new and effective ways to minimize damage and injuries, installing guards around your inventory racks is a wise choice.

Look for rack guards as you visit your guardrail system supplier. These products are essential aspects of any warehouse safety infrastructure and will quickly pay for themselves with the protection they offer.