How Racking Safety Can Prevent Warehouse Fires?

Warehouse Fires

Racking safety is just one part of a larger commitment to safety in general — and warehouse fires are just one of the many things which adhering to warehouse safety can prevent.

Warehouse fires often make headlines because of their scale. Yet, after the drama of a fire has burnt out, not enough attention is paid to the lessons learnt from these tragedies. A warehouse fire in Oakland killed 36 people and burned the whole building to the ground. As a result, two men were eventually charged with manslaughter after failing to properly take responsibility for the safety of the people inside their building.

All of this received plenty of coverage, as many expressed their condolences for the victims and their anger towards those responsible. What has not received enough coverage or attention, however, is how fires like this can be prevented in future.

Racking Safety Can Lessen The Main Causes of Warehouse Fires

For Ian Gough, senior technical advisor at BAFSA, the way to tackle fires should be entirely preventative. At the 2017 SEMA General Meeting, Gough blamed a culture of “unrealistic expectation” as one of the causes of warehouse fires.

In other words, far too often, warehouse owners expect that the fire services will be able to put out a warehouse fire. The reality is that this is extremely unlikely. The fire services can put out house fires and they can rescue people from buildings. However, they should be seen as a last resort and the idea that they will be able to put out a warehouse fire once it’s started is — what Gough calls — an “unrealistic expectation”.

Defective work equipment is the main cause of warehouse fires in England and Wales, with 28% of them being caused that way. A further 11% of warehouse fires are caused by misuse of equipment.

Both of those dangers can be alleviated by racking safety and by following SEMA safety guidelines. When businesses perform the regular racking inspections which both the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations (PUWER) 1998 and HSE recommend, they are making sure that their work equipment is neither faulty or misused. In doing so, they doing their bit to lessen the two dangers which make up nearly half of all warehouse fires.

Racking Systems Force People to Take Responsibility

Another issue Gough highlights is the unwillingness for people to take responsibility after a fire has occurred. After the Magna Park warehouse fire in 2005, Gough recalls a distinct lack of accountability for the fire.

The building was owned, operated, and managed by several different businesses, each with their own interests. Each group blamed the other, and to Gough this begged the question: “Who’s in charge here?” His opinion is that, when people fail to take responsibility, “that’s when accidents happen.”

Racking safety forces people to take responsibility. HSE’s guidance states that each workplace needs to nominate a “person responsible for racking safety (PRRS)” and — like all other warehouse staff — this person should be “competent”. What’s more, according to the CDM regulations 2015, it’s the responsibility of the employer to ensure that warehouse staff are “competent”.

When properly followed, racking safety and warehouse safety in general, gives clear guidance as to who is responsible for what. This responsibility is what prevents accidents. When someone knows that they will ultimately be the person to blame if something goes wrong, they are much more likely to do everything they can to make sure that nothing does go wrong.

Racking Safety Can Prevent Fires, But Sprinklers Stop Them

If there was one thing Gough stressed more than anything else in his talk, it was this: every single warehouse in the UK should be fitted with sufficient sprinklers.

Should the worst happen and a fire starts in a warehouse, sprinklers are there to stop them. Up to 99% of all fires in sprinkler-protected warehouses are prevented by the sprinkler systems. That success rate should be enough for sprinklers to be mandatory, but this is not the case.

Gough expressed his frustration that one of the key reasons people don’t install sprinklers is that they are worried about water damage. He argues that too many people imagine that if someone sets off a match and a tiny bit of smoke gets into the air, the whole system will go off.

While this is something often depicted in cinema — from films as wide-ranging as Die Hard to The Incrediblesit’s simply not true. The truth is that sprinkler systems only ever go off in a room where there’s a fire and they use a lot less water to put out a fire than the fire service would.

When sprinkler systems are combined with proper racking safety, warehouse fires can be prevented and — if necessary — stopped in their tracks.

For a FREE, no-obligation consultation on our range of racking safety services, contact Storage Equipment Experts today.

How to Spot a Bad Racking Inspection Course?

Bad Racking Inspection Course

Bad Inspection courses vary a lot in quality across the UK and Ireland, so how you can you spot a bad one?

A bad racking inspection course can be worse than useless. Not only will it not teach you good practice for racking inspection safety; it runs the risk of teaching the wrong way to inspect a racking system. In some cases, doing something wrong is more dangerous than not doing it at all.

To make sure that your racking inspections are the rigorous safety checks they should be, you need the right kind of training. In order to get that, here’s a quick guide on how to spot a bad racking inspection courses.

A Bad Racking Inspection Course Makes False Promises

SEMA delivers a course designed for people who want to pursue a career in racking inspections. The people who attend this course usually have some kind of background in engineering or safety and have every intention of starting their own racking inspection business.

The people who pass the pre-course qualifier, attend this intensive course, and attend all of the necessary follow up training are SEMA approved racking inspectors. Attending any other racking inspection courses will not make them a SEMA approved racking inspector. Courses which accidentally — or purposefully — suggest otherwise are wrong.

This is relevant because HSE recommends inspections from outside “experts”, such as SEMA approved racking inspectors, at least once a year. Attending a racking inspection courses will not qualify you as an “expert”; only SEMA approved racking inspectors qualify as experts.

What a racking inspection courses allow you to do is perform the regular staff-led inspections which HSE also recommends.

A Bad Racking Inspection Course Is Not Thorough

Learning how to properly inspect a racking system isn’t like learning how to solve a Rubik’s Cube. While the latter can be learnt by watching a 20-minute video, the former is a lot more complicated and it should be treated as such.

The racking inspection course we offer at Storage Equipment Experts is a full-day course. We pack as much information as we can into the day, but we don’t rush through anything either. We make certain that each person attending the course gets as much out of it as possible.

A Bad Racking Inspection Course Will Be Delivered By Someone Unqualified

Anyone can offer a racking inspection course, but that doesn’t mean you can or should trust just anyone. In order to guarantee that you will adopt good practice with your racking inspections. You need a racking inspection course delivered by a SEMA approved racking inspector. This is exactly the kind, of course, we offer at Storage Equipment Experts.

A Bad Racking Inspection Course Is Inflexible

There are SEMA approved racking inspectors all over the UK and Ireland. In fact, there are SEMA approved racking inspectors all over the world. All of this is well and good, but a racking inspection course being delivered in Shanghai isn’t much help if your business is based in Redditch.

London is an extremely accessible city for people across the UK, Ireland, and even most of Europe. This is why attending the racking inspection courses at our training centre is so easy. However, even travelling to a city as accessible as London isn’t an option for everyone. The new generation of business owners is more strapped for time than ever. It’s for this reason that we also offer to travel to your workplace to deliver our racking inspection course.

As well as making the courses easier for your staff to attend, another benefit is that we able to show you exactly how a racking inspection should be performed in your workplace. What’s more, we are happy to travel to any business in the UK or Ireland to deliver this service.

If you’re considering booking a racking inspection courses for you or your staff, contact Storage Equipment Experts today for a FREE consultation. With testimonials from Tate Modern, Smiffys, and Dunlop. We are proud to offer the best racking inspection services in the UK.

Will Racking Inspection Legislation Change in 2018?

Racking Inspection Legislation

2018 will likely bring many changes to the UK, so racking inspection legislation may have to change with it.

Racking inspection legislation has gone through many changes since the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 was passed. What started off as a very vague — but very important — workplace safety law became HSE. Today, HSE helps to create legislation and guidance for many specific workplace safety issues. Racking inspection legislation is just one such example of this.

What Is Racking Inspection Legislation?

Racking inspection legislation is a tough thing to define. The most cohesive guide on the topic of how and how often businesses should inspect their racking systems in the UK comes from HSE’s HSG76. The second edition of this guide was published in 2007 and it hasn’t been updated since.

However, HSE’s HSG76 is not legislation in of itself. Rather, it is good practice guidance from HSE. As such, the guide opens with the following caveat:

This guidance is issued by the Health and Safety Executive. Following the guidance is not compulsory and you are free to take other action. But if you do follow the guidance you will normally be doing enough to comply with the law.

In short, while HSG76 may not have changed since 2007, that doesn’t mean that racking inspection legislation hasn’t changed or couldn’t change.

Examples of Racking Inspection Legislation

There are no British laws which were explicitly written to refer to racking inspection, but there are laws which affect racking inspections. In this sense, many pieces of racking inspection legislation have been introduced and have changed over the years.

One of the most important of these is the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations (PUWER) 1998. In January this year, a business in Northampton was fined £330,000 and had to pay damages of over £11,000 after it pleaded guilty to breaching the fifth regulation of PUWER 1998.

This regulation emphasises an employer’s responsibility to make sure that work equipment is inspected after installation and at regular intervals. It’s exactly because of this regulation that businesses are legally required to inspect their racking systems in the same way, as racking systems count as work equipment.

So, Could Racking Inspection Legislation Change in 2018?

It’s possible. What’s more, it’s completely possible for the law to change and for HSE HS76 to stay the same. This is exactly what happened when the CDM Regulations were updated in 2015.

Coming into force just three years ago, these regulations have completely changed the onus of responsibility when it comes to racking inspections. Past CDM Regulations emphasised the importance of competence for employees working in a construction environment.

The issue was that competence — as well as what counted as construction work — was ill-defined by the previous regulations. In 2015, this all changed with the new CDM Regulations, which greatly expanded the legal definition of construction to include warehouses, television studios, and film sets to name a few examples.

What’s more, it is now the legal responsibility of employers to ensure that their employees are competent. It’s also now their legal responsibility to provide a convincing argument for the competence of their employers.

This change in responsibility had the effect of freeing up time and money for HSE, as well as making HSE’s HSG76 more important than ever. Even if the guide itself didn’t change, the fact that it is now an employer’s responsibility to define competence for themselves has led many to fall back on HSE’s advice in this guide.

It’s in this guide that HSE recommends annual racking inspections from SEMA approved racking inspectors (who they label as “experts”). They also recommend regular staff-led racking inspections.

At Storage Equipment Experts, we provide racking inspections from SEMA approved inspectors. We also provide racking inspection training from a SEMA approved racking inspector, so that your staff are competent enough to perform the regular staff-led inspections HSE recommends.

 Contact Storage Equipment Experts today for a FREE consultation on racking inspections from SEMA approved inspectors.

Can Rack Inspection Training Help You With Best Practice?

Rack Inspection Training

Rack inspection training should act as a template on which businesses base their actions

When you want to teach your employees how to perform staff-led racking inspections, the best way to do this is to make them attend rack inspection training. Doing so will give them the confidence and the expertise to perform rack inspections themselves. The reason for this is that — arguably — rack inspection training is an example of best practice. Still, what does that mean?

What Is Rack Inspection Best Practice?

The Amazon warehouse has 45,000 robots in it and the company is looking to introduce even more in the coming years. To Amazon, there is a right way and a wrong way to operate within a warehouse. It believes that — should a robot be able to learn the right way of doing things and execute its tasks accordingly — this robot can work for Amazon.

Behind all this is the idea of “best practice”. Like a “zero accident” workplace, best practice is best understood as a way of thinking, rather than a goal which can be achieved. A workplace where one way of doing things is the right way of doing them on every occasion; that’s best practice.

In reality, of course, it doesn’t always work like that. This is why HSE’s HSG76 places emphasis on the fact that their guide to warehouse safety doles out “good practice” advice, but that other courses of action might be taken in other instances.

While it’s good to have some leeway, the benefit of rack inspection training is that it can give you some guidance as to what best practice is. Of course, as with HSE’s guidance, it’s also perfectly fine to view it as “good practice” instead.

Why Should Businesses Follow the Guidance Given in Rack Inspection Training?

In recent years, we have been plagued by a lack of belief in experts and what experts have to say about issues. With so much information out there, people want to believe that they can figure out difficult issues for themselves.

Safety is one of many sectors where this is a problem. When health and safety myths make their way into the public consciousness because of a newspaper headline or some internet rumour, it can be hard to stamp these false ideas out. It’s because of issues like this that health and safety experts are so important.

The people who deliver rack inspection training at Storage Equipment Experts are — well — experts. This is the label which HSE’s HSG76 gives to SEMA approved racking inspectors (SARIs) and our rack inspection training course is delivered by a SEMA approved racking inspector (SARI).

To become a SARI, a person needs to pass a pre-course qualifier, attend a three-day intensive SEMA approved racking inspector course, pass the end of course assessment, and continue to top up their knowledge by attending seminars and additional courses. The failure rate for the SARI course is high, which is why there are only 107 SARIs in the world.

It is because of SEMA’s high standards and the high failure rate of the SARI course that the people who are SARIs are labelled as experts. As such, the guidance they give in rack inspection training courses should be trusted.

Rack inspection training may not be best practice advice, but it’s certainly good practice advice which goes hand in hand with the advice from HSE’s HSG76 as well the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998 and the CDM Regulations 2015.

To receive rack inspection training from an expert, contact Storage Equipment Experts for a FREE, no-obligation consultation on our range of racking inspection services.