Protecting Warehouse Infrastructure With Safety Guards and Barriers

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Warehouses are large and active environments. As a warehouse owner or manager, you’re responsible for a busy workplace filled with complex infrastructure and numerous employees. Your responsibilities include receiving, storing and distributing high-volume products on time. You have to balance priorities by staying on time and remaining within budget. You’re also responsible for your workers’ safety and protecting your valuable equipment.

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Warehouses can be inherently dangerous workplaces. Your facility has moving components and mobile people. For you to get daily production met, these two active ingredients have to interface, which presents risks and hazards that could result in serious injuries or expensive property damage. However, you can mitigate those hazardous risks by protecting your warehouse infrastructure with safety guards and barriers.

Contact us online  Give us a call at  877-350-2729

Warehouse Safety Solutions and Statistics

Practicing warehouse safety is a full-time job. It’s one of the most important tasks in your business, because an unsafe workplace is a costly workplace. Injuries and equipment or product damage severely affect your bottom line. That’s not to mention the blow to workers’ morale and lost customer confidence when someone gets hurt or critical shipments are delayed.

According to the United States Bureau of Labor (BOL), warehouses have one of the highest injury rates in all industries. The most recent 2018 BOL statistics report warehouses employ over one million Americans. These statistics also report that five out of 100 — or five percent — of warehouse workers get injured on the job. In addition, 3.7 percent of injured warehouse workers have missed work days, incurred job restrictions or transferred from the role where they received injuries.

These are serious statistics. Sadly, many of these debilitating injuries were preventable. For some, the simple solution might have been installing warehouse safety guards or warehouse safety barriers. Protecting employees and equipment with warehouse safety guards and barriers would have been the efficient and cost-effective solution. Even more seriously, guards and barriers could have prevented the fatal workplace injuries.

The U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) also keep statistics. OSHA’s website lists 2016 statistics on worker injuries along with illnesses and fatalities. Not specific to the warehouse industry, there were 4,693 private industry worker fatalities in 2016. Two-thirds of these job site deaths resulted from what OSHA terms the “Big Four.” Those were fatalities caused by:

  • Falls from working at height or through an unprotected opening
  • Being struck by a moving object such as a forklift truck
  • Electrocution from energy sources that weren’t locked out
  • Crushing after being caught in between moving structures or equipment

OSHA’s Top 10 Safety Violations

OSHA estimates that eliminating the big four would save nearly 3,100 worker lives every year. Their information goes on to identify the most frequently cited workplace safety infractions. These safety violations are also general to American industries and not necessarily specific to warehousing. However, the warehouse industry experiences all. Here are OSHA’s Top Ten safety issues for 2017:

  1. Lack of or improper fall protection: This issue includes lack of safety barriers on platforms, elevated work surfaces and walkways. It also includes unguarded openings and failure to implement fall arrest measures. Highly visible physical barriers would quickly solve this problem.
  2. Poor hazardous communication standards: While signage was OSHA’s main identifier, they referred to visible barriers as leading indicators for hazards. OSHA considers visible barriers like general safety railings and bollards hazard warnings as well as effective accident prevention measures.
  3. Scaffolding infractions: Properly built, scaffolds are a marvelous access tool. However, when scaffolding devices are poorly erected or fail to include protective guards and barriers, they become deadly. Simply adding the right guards to form barriers against falls is a straightforward safety solution.
  4. Respiratory protection issues: Failure to wear proper personal protection equipment (PPE) like suitable respirators is another top OSHA concern. Respirator type and fitting depend on the particular hazard. That might protect the frontline worker, but by-passers without breathing protecting often fall ill from secondary exposure. Having marked barriers to guard areas with hazardous airborne material is an excellent solution.
  5. Controlling hazardous energy failure: Unprotected energy sources like electricity, steam and compressed air are lethal unless they’re de-energized when workers are servicing systems. High energy controls must be locked out and tagged out (LOTO) at all times when they expose workers to danger. Guards over system controls and barriers to access without authorization would save countless worker lives and prevent serious injury.
  6. Inadequate and unsecured ladders: These problems fall into working at height and are common hazards in almost all workplaces, including the warehouse industry. Warehouse workers accessing products stored on high shelves often use portable or fixed ladders and expose others below them to falling objects. The safety solution here is having ladders properly placed and the surrounding area guarded by barriers.
  7. Problems with powered industrial trucks: This is OSHA’s term for forklifts. Every warehouse has active forklifts, and yours is no exception. Think of the potential for damage where workers are struck by forklifts or your products are smashed by accidental operation. All forklift paths and travel ways must be marked and guarded by barriers that delineate hazardous zones.
  8. Lacking machinery and machine guarding: Warehouse machines like conveyors, pallet handlers and stretch wrappers have multiple moving parts. If there’s any chance of workers contacting moving machinery, that region needs guarding and secondary barricades to stop accidental entanglement.
  9. Exposed electrical wiring: Drilling deeper into the hazardous energy problem, OSHA singled out electrical wiring as a leading cause of workplace injuries. Often, electrical connections need exposing for service, repair or renovation. That presents a dangerous situation unless the connections and wiring are guarded or erected barriers restrict accidental contact.
  10. Training inadequacies: Poor training is responsible for many workplace mishaps. It’s vitally important for workers to know their workspace, their duties and the equipment they’re operating. It’s also essential for adjacent workers to be aware of safety hazards that might affect them. While you can’t train everyone for everything, you can significantly mitigate these worksite hazards by installing efficient guards and barriers. That’s an effective solution, and safety guards and barriers are also an economical solution.

Contact us online  Give us a call at  877-350-2729

Impact of Safety Guard Equipment on Employee Safety

Employee safety isn’t maintained only for regulatory compliance. Keeping your warehouse workers safe is something you commit to each and every day. You work hard to build an excellent safety culture where all employees buy into your occupational health and safety program. They should feel welcome and appreciated when they bring up potential safety concerns at regular meetings.

Guards and barriers are common safety concerns in every warehouse setting. New machinery and new procedures bring up new concerns. Usually, those concerns are how to protect workers from all hazards presented by equipment they aren’t familiar with. Then, there’s always the complacency problem, where workers are so used to a piece of machinery that they let their guard down.

Letting guards down should happen only when all workers are aware that equipment is under repair or service. During that time, ample precautions are taken because workers are informed and prepared for changes. It’s at normal running operations where machinery needs proper safety guarding.

Safety guards are part of overall hazard mitigation in your warehouse. Anywhere you have moving parts, you’re going to have hazards to mitigate. In the two-step process, you can involve your employees. It’s especially important to include those workers closet to the hazards in your safety program and accident prevention plan. Encourage relevant people to help you:

  • Identify specific equipment and machinery hazards in your workplace
  • Work together to reduce or eliminate hazard risks that could cause harm

Regardless of your experience in warehousing, you may not be aware of key machinery and equipment safety principles. Safety guards and barriers are vital lines of defense in protecting your workforce from injury caused by three distinct hazard groups. You need to consider all groups in order to affect a workable hazard mitigation plan that includes barriers and guards as front-line defenders. They’re just that important for employee safety.

Mechanical Hazards

All equipment and machinery tools have moving parts. Some moving parts are internal. Some are external. By design nature, housings and encasements guard internal moving parts like rotors, gears, shafts and cranks. They’re not normally dangerous, as long as they stay enclosed.

It’s the external moving parts you have to worry about. If you look around your warehouse, you’ll see plenty of moving part examples. They might be overhead arms on stretch wrappers, rollers on conveyors or engine fans on forklifts. These mechanical hazards can seriously hurt someone if not properly guarded with access barriers in place. Consider these issues when assessing your machinery and equipment for mechanical hazards:

  • Moving parts that workers can reach into, such as unguarded engines
  • Objects that machinery or equipment can eject, like products on conveyors
  • Parts that move and can reach out to workers, such as stretch wrapper arms
  • Mobile machinery that travels around your facility, like forklifts and pallet jacks

Injury risks relate directly to individual moving equipment hazards. All are serious threats to your valuable workers, and all these hazards can be mitigated by installing suitable barriers and guards. These are your mechanical hazards and injury risks:

  • Rotating parts, like gears, sprockets, pulleys and shafts, cause entanglement injuries.
  • Solid surfaces moving together, like forklift wheels on concrete floors, cause crushing injuries.
  • Scissor or shear action equipment, like table lifts and wrappers, cause severing injuries.
  • Sharp edges, whether moving or stationary, cause cutting, slicing and puncturing injuries.
  • Flexible equipment such as hoses and cables cause hazards leading to slips, trips and falls.

Take into account how many of these common mechanical hazards lurk in your warehouse. Then, consider what you can do to mitigate your hazards and prevent serious injuries before they happen. You’ll find that in most situations, your mechanical troubles are easily solved through the installation of the right guards and barriers.

Non-Mechanical Hazards

Non-mechanical machinery and equipment hazards aren’t due to moving parts. Yet they can be equally dangerous, if not more so, unless guarded. Hazards from non-mechanical sources include pressurized gasses and fluids, noxious emissions, chemical products and by-products, electricity and noise pollution.

Your mitigation program for non-mechanical hazards should also identify and isolate trouble spots. Be aware that non-mechanical threats are sneaky affairs. Where moving parts will suddenly injure a worker, chemical, noise and other dangerous exposures bring on long-term effects that take years to develop.

Mitigating non-mechanical hazards follows the same two-step process you’d go through with moving threats. Identify the source, and deal with guarding your employees against exposure. Often, that involves creating barriers to keep them away from source spots.

Access Hazards

Protecting workers from access hazards is tricky. On the one hand, workers need access to machinery and equipment to do their job. On the other hand, you need guards and barriers in place to keep them from getting hurt. The solution lies in creating the right guards to protect directly exposed workers and devising barriers to keep non-essential staff, contractors and visitors at a safe distance.

When you’re assessing your hazard analysis and developing your mitigation action plan, there are certain considerations to make. You need to get reasonable production on a routine basis, but you can’t run the risk of leaving hazards unprotected and allowing injuries to occur or your property to get damaged. Think of these access hazard questions:

  • Who needs continual access to hazardous locations?
  • What support personnel also require occasional access?
  • What additional equipment needs carrying in and out?
  • Where is your best and safest access point?
  • How will workers gain safe access?
  • When will you have visitors to the area access location?

Make sure you include every worker who’s affected by the hazard in your analysis. They can be your best resource for solving problems and mitigating risky injuries. Your employees will also offer you solutions to guard your warehouse infrastructure and prevent equipment damage.

Impact of Safety Guard Equipment on Preventing Equipment Damage

Your workers aren’t your only valuable at risk without proper safety guards and barriers in place. Your entire infrastructure could be seriously damaged, costing you thousands of dollars in repair bills. Just think of one full-force forklift hit against an unguarded rack loaded with expensive palletized products.

That’s one of the reasons that top American companies are manufacturing safety guards. These quality producers are also manufacturing safety barriers. Cherry’s Industrial Equipment is a proud supplier of leading safety barriers and guards that you can install throughout your warehouse. Strategically placed, these relatively inexpensive safety devices can protect both your workers and your property.

Guards and barriers don’t serve only to protect people. You have many expensive stationary components in and around your warehouse. You also have serious structural components, like columns and walls that stand vulnerable to aggressive forklift drivers. You have vital non-structural parts — such as overhead door tracks in your bays — as well as highly expensive conveyor systems. Then there are your racks and wire shelves, holding untold value in product inventory.

You want your employees, contractors and visitors safe, of course. You can greatly decrease their hazard risk by installing safety barriers and guards. But you can give the same protection to your building and product infrastructure by sourcing, purchasing and installing guards and barriers.

When you partner with Cherry’s Industrial Equipment, you don’t just get excellent people and product protection. You also get a team of material handling professionals who will recommend what barriers and guards will have the best safety impact for preventing equipment damage. Your initial layout will have a substantial return on investment after you’ve prevented one worker’s injury or stopped a runaway forklift.

Contact us online  Give us a call at  877-350-2729

Cherry’s Safety Warehouse Equipment Guards

Cherry’s Industrial Equipment has exactly the right safety guard and barrier you need to protect your employees from serious injuries and your infrastructure from expensive damages. Our safety guards are perfect for in-plant use around the shipping or receiving docks as well as protecting the exterior of your warehouse. Cherry’s safety equipment guards and barriers vary in design, but they have one thing in common: They act as deterrents against accidents involving people and property.

Besides protecting people from mechanical, non-mechanical and access hazards, guards and barriers from Cherry’s Industrial Equipment protect your expensive machinery, equipment and building infrastructure. That includes your vulnerable pallet racking, throughput line and even the doors at your dock. Here are the best guards and barriers you’ll find at Cherry’s.

Warehouse Barriers

Our safety barriers come in many configurations and sizes. They all serve the same essential service, which is to delineate pathways and protect people from accessing dangerous locations. They also protect you from falling from a height or walking in front of a loaded forklift. Cherry’s safety barriers are high-quality materials and brightly painted to stand out. You can’t miss them.

Warehouse Bollards

Bollards are the warehouse soldiers. They stand upright and on guard to stop mobile equipment from contacting stationary infrastructure. You’ll use Cherry’s safety bollards at high-risk locations like at racks and shelving where you can’t afford impact on valuables. That goes for trucks and vans at your loading bays. Cherry’s bright yellow bollards are steel construction, with some having concrete-filling potential for more density and toughness. Choose from moveable, removable, offset, pour-in-place, folding and spring-loaded bollards.

Warehouse Column Guards

Your columns, posts, pipes and beams are crucial structural and service members in your warehouse. They’re what support and supply your building. You can’t afford to take a structural hit, and you don’t have to when you install Cherry’s safety column guards. We offer 36- and 48-inch-high column guards that defend against mobile assailants. You get a solid return on your investment and minimized risk of structural damage and personal injury by installing Cherry’s column guards.

Warehouse Conveyer Guards

You probably shudder when you think of conveyor damage. Your conveyor system is an extremely expensive and important part of your material handling flow, and damaging it with accidental strikes is too high a price to pay on any day. With throughput stopped, your production is gone. This situation can be prevented by simply installing Cherry’s safety conveyer guards. Our safety guards measure 12 feet tall and run in three- to 10-foot section lengths.

Warehouse Machinery Guards

Moving parts are dangerous parts. Cherry’s machinery guards see to it that moving equipment components are well-protected. When you install machinery guards from Cherry’s Industrial Equipment, you know you have America’s best manufacturing quality and dependability. You also know you have the best in OSHA and other regulatory compliance. Our machinery guards are bright yellow, install quickly and have solid steel construction.

Warehouse Modular Guards

Modular guards are barrier railing systems that interlock and prevent unauthorized access to dangerous areas. They also stop unsuspecting travelers from getting into traffic and guard against falling from a height. Cherry’s modular guards have steel safety bollards for uprights, come with aluminum or steel safety rails and fit into floor-placed sockets. Rail heights come in 36-inch and 48-inch measurements.

Warehouse Overhead Door Track Guards

Can you imagine the hassle if a forklift or other mobile piece took out your overhead door tacks just before a crucial shipment arrived or had to depart? You’d wish you’d installed Cherry’s overhead door track guides. Fortunately, it’s easy to install Cherry’s high-impact resistant and highly visible door track guides. The investment is affordable and reduces downtime potential.

Warehouse Post Guards

Even your best forklift operator can have a blind spell. Unfortunately, it’ll probably happen when they’re near a post that’s supporting your racks and upright shelving. That’s not a good thing, but you can stop accidental contact by installing Cherry’s warehouse post guards. They’re easy to mount, have adjustable heights and stay highly visible. You’ll prevent costly damage, eliminate disruptions and reduce injuries. Now that’s cost-effective protection.

Warehouse Rack Guards

Like post guards, rack guards from Cherry’s Industrial Equipment are low-cost but high-return investments. Rack guards stop accidental impact and prevent the collapse of your racking system that may be holding a fortune in products. We carry standard 36-inch height guards, low-profile guards and shock-absorbent polyethylene rack guards. We also stock heavy-duty outdoor rack guards for your weathered environment.

Warehouse Safety Railings

Safety railings are a mainstay of Cherry’s guard and barrier products. If you consider OSHA’s top safety violations, you’ll know that barrier protection is the key element in preventing falls, keeping people away from moving objects, isolating them from energy sources and stopping the potential for crushing injuries. You’ll have far fewer workplace accidents involving people, products and property when you have Cherry’s warehouse safety railings in place.

Contact Cherry’s Industrial Equipment for Your Warehouse Guards

Cherry’s Industrial Equipment has been your trusted material handling and safety protection source since 1983. We’re trusted by over 20,000 customers in the warehouse supply and material handling industry. That’s because we give you the best warehouse products at the lowest price. We give you easy, safe online shopping as well, and we provide you with custom solutions for your material handling and safety challenges.

Cherry’s also gives you the finest customer service you’ll find in the industrial equipment business. Call our knowledgeable material handling specialists today to discuss what you need to safely guard your warehouse people, products and property. If you need custom guarding then let us show you how we can help. We’re at 877-350-2729, or you can reach us through our handy online contact form.

Contact us online  Give us a call at  877-350-2729

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