Busy warehouse docks can be dangerous places if you are not paying attention to what is happening around you. The safety of the workers on the docks is essential, and you may want to consider looking at your warehouse docks to determine if there are things you can add or change to make the area safer for your employees.
Visibility Enhancements
Items stacked or staged on warehouse docks can reduce the visibility, especially around corners, on your loading dock. Adding things like convex mirrors in strategic places around the dock can improve the ability to see people and equipment moving around the dock.
For mirrors to work appropriately, they need to be up high and at the proper angle so that people or equipment operators approaching the area can see around corners or over walls before they get to them. In some cases, the mirrors are positioned so that you can see a long distance, like down an aisle that forklifts use frequently. Other times mirrors are used outside where there is a blind corner that semi-trucks come around a lot.
The mirrors can help people avoid running into each other or other accidents from happening, but they need to be in place, and people need to learn to use them as they approach blind corners and intersections. If you are going to put up convex mirrors, make sure everyone knows where they are located so they can start looking for them as they move around your warehouse docks.
Dock Gates
Warehouse docks often have doors open to the outside when a trailer is not sitting in the door. One thing you may want to consider adding to the dock is a barricade or gate that stretches across the open doors to keep someone from walking off the dock, or worse, driving a forklift or other equipment through the door and off the end of the loading dock.
Warehouse doors are typically several feet about the ground, and falling off the dock can cause someone to be hurt badly. Equipment that goes off the dock will most likely need replacing or a significant amount of work to repair it, which is also very costly.
The gates that stretch in front of the warehouse doors allow the doors to be open when the weather is nice and offer some protection from accidents at the same time. On a busy dock, a wrong turn into a door that is empty and open could be catastrophic without this kind of protection.
For more tips on keeping warehouse docks and doors safer, reach out to an industrial warehouse parts supplier near you.
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