As you manage your warehouse, you want to ensure you strike the right balance of storing items efficiently while maintaining employee safety. Although pallet racking systems are essential for optimizing storage capacity, they can pose significant risks if you need to manage them properly. This makes compliance with safety regulations crucial. Here, we outline three pallet racking safety regulations to familiarize you with.
Ensure Equipment Can Safely Pass Your Racks
One of the primary considerations in pallet racking safety is ensuring that all equipment, particularly forklifts and other material handling devices, can safely navigate the racking systems. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration makes it imperative to maintain clear aisles and pathways to prevent collisions that could result in accidents.
Regularly inspect your warehouse layout to ensure you maintain these conditions consistently. Doing so will reduce the rate of accidents and maintain operational efficiency.
Utilize Racks That Can Hold Your Items
Another pallet-racking safety regulation to familiarize oneself with is one from the American National Standards Institute. This requires you to utilize racks that can hold the weight of the items you store. Rack overload is a common cause of structural failure, leading to catastrophic accidents and significant inventory loss.
Assess your racking system's maximum load capacity and match it with the weight of the stored goods. Conduct regular audits to ensure you aren't overburdening your racks.
Keep Your Racks a Safe Distance From Sprinklers
Ensuring that you've positioned your pallet racks at a safe distance from sprinklers is also a critical safety regulation. Fire safety codes, such as those the National Fire Protection Association outlines, mandate specific clearance requirements to allow sprinklers to function effectively in the event of a fire.
Typically, you must have a minimum vertical clearance of 18 inches from the top of storage to the sprinkler deflectors. This distance prevents the stored items from obstructing the water distribution, ensuring that the entire storage area has adequate coverage and that you can quickly contain fires. Regularly inspect your facility to ensure the maintenance of these clearances, especially after any reconfiguration of racking systems or changes in inventory height.
Ensuring that your facility's pallet racking follows these regulations can make it a practical warehouse management component. Georgia Pallet Rack can help you take advantage of vertical storage in your facility with products such as our used pallet rack uprights. These can easily fit the needs of those with cost restraints while providing dependable, long-lasting products.
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