Happy New Year everyone! Here’s to a prosperous and safe 2017 for everyone who is involved in workplace safety, whether directly or indirectly. A happy year is a year with fewer workplace incidents and deaths.

Now that we got that platitude out of the way …

As we enter a new year, this is often a good time to look back only to take lessons from the past year and learn how to apply those lessons so we can be a better person in the new year. We usually spend more time thinking ahead to the hope and opportunity that new year brings, so that we can feel like we have a clean slate, leave our baggage at the door of the old year – even if that baggage requires a forklift – and feel a lightness of optimism.

Speaking of Forklifts …

It’s quite a coincidence that forklifts were just mentioned, I have to tell you. That reference couldn’t have come at a better time.

Who has noticed the forklift being a more prominent tool and piece of equipment in many worksites? Offically called powered industrial trucks (PITs), forklifts of various types and sizes have become vital in many manufacturing and warehouse settings. But as the numbers and uses of forklifts have grown, so have the risks of incidents and injuries on the job either to operators or workers who are in the vicinity of these machines.

We’ll kick off 2017 with a series of posts about forklifts and forklift safety, keyed by a recent Professional safety magazine article written by Christopher Janicak and Tracey Cekada. The mission of the article was to bring the dangers and risks of forklift operation to the forefront due to incident numbers, and introduce some strategies and tactics to mitigate risks and improve safety of all workers around PITs.

Unfortunate Forklift Numbers

To help bring forward the point and justification for the article and what it covers (which we will over the next few posts), Janicak and Cekada cited some numbers from Bureau of Labor Statistics data. In the last full year that data is available, it was reported that there were nearly 7,000 injuries involving forklifts in which there were days off work. This does not include minor-injury or non-injury incidents, but the number comes to nearly 19 forklift-related injuries every calendar day in the United States. Also in the same year, nearly six people died per month from a forklift incident.

These are not the kinds of numbers that should be ignored or just treated as “collateral damage” when it comes to forklift use. Not when there are ways to mitigate the hazards and risks inherent with operating these vehicles.

A Deeper Look Into the PITs

So what to do?

The first thing we will do in this blog is follow the logic of the article, as it takes us on a quick journey through a couple of case studies involving forklift incidents. Janicak and Cekada introduce us to an incident of a forklifft rollover and a an incident where a worker was hit by a forklift. The next post will feature those case studies and go into the regulations that govern forklift operations.

If you have a forklift in operation anywhere in your inventory, these next few posts will be vital. Make reading these a Nw Year’s resolution that you can actually see through to the end.

You know, unlike that weight-loss thing.