[WhiteTiger]

Most of us have seen those 'funny' videos of forklifts hitting those typical 'orange racks' and then the whole warehouse falls down.

I was one of those forklift drivers. Thankfully, my video never made it online.

I was carrying a liquid load in it's tank, on a wet floor. I took the corner too fast, and the liquid shifted in the tank, then started rocking back and forth. Before I could correct it, I was sliding across the wet floor.

I hit load-first, corner first into the bottom tier of the racking, collapsing it and destroying the two bottom layers of racking (of 4). All 4 pallets of stuff on the shelves shattered, collapsing down onto the ground and around my forklift.


I had seen the videos too, and was just waiting for the entire 20 section set of racking to come down on my head and kill me...but nothing moved after the 4 pallets finished collapsing and settled.

I carefully got off my forklift, found my boss, told him what happened, and told him I was going home (I was still shaking so much I could barely stand).


So far as I know, before I left the company 2 years later, the accident investigator was never able to determine why the entire set of racking didn't collapse, which should have taken the rest of the racking with it (that racking is notoriously fragile).


The only damage was to the section I hit, which was unusable until replaced as everything had been warped out of shape, and the 4 pallets of goods that broke in the fall.