November 4, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Well, I can finally talk about it. A few weeks ago I attended a media-only introduction to the C-5, Crown Equipment Corporation’s first company-manufactured internal combustion (IC) forklift.  It features an industrial engine that was jointly developed with John Deere Power Systems (John Deere). What do you think of when you think John Deere? Probably farm equipment. Maybe a combine?

Exactly. According to Crown President Jim Dicke III, customers with IC trucks in their fleet were complaining about poor engine performance, overheating, and maintenance difficulties. “We saw an opportunity to help our customers move beyond the existing limitations of IC truck performance,&...Read More

November 2, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

In my last blog I addressed under-ride, a particularly ugly and often fatal type of lift truck accident. I also told you that the House Education and Labor Committee would soon be delivering a full markup of the Protect America’s Workers Act of 2009 (S. 1580/H.R. 2067) to the Senate. This bill would attach criminal liability to employers whose failure to train lift truck operators resulted in such a fatality.

I know some of you might be rolling your eyes, having heard this kind of tough talk from OSHA before. You know that in recent years OSHA has taken a softer, more consultative approach to enforcement. I...Read More

October 29, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

The operator of a standup order picker was killed on the job recently. The circumstances weren't unusual. OSHA arrived on the scene asking all the right questions. But there's one question all lift truck operators and fleet managers need to ask themselves: Did this man die in vain?

What happened to him could have happened to anyone. There’s even a name for this kind of accident—“under-ride.” That's a sanitary name for a grotesque way to go. An operator traveling with his forks trailing backs up toward a storage location. But without realizing it, he goes too far—far enough so the vehicle passes under the rack’s horizontal crossbar. The crossbar enters the operator’s compartment and crushes him.

According to ...Read More

October 26, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

The worst insult you could pay a warehouse manager is that his facility is a black hole. That implies a huge cosmic point of no return. Well if logistics can borrow scientific terminology to imply chaos on a cosmic order, why shouldn’t science be free to use a logistics glossary to bring cosmic theories down to earth?

It’s been done. Introducing Sunfall, a kind of outer-space warehouse management system developed for an astrophysics project called the Nearby Supernova Factory. This project represents a new way for scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA, to discover and dis...Read More

October 22, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 47 million Americans, or 20 percent of the population under the age of 65, were without health insurance last year. That doesn’t have anything to do with lift trucks. This does:

According to OSHA, approximately 95,000 employees are injured every year while operating powered industrial trucks.

These two sets of statistics should move you—if not to empathy, then to action. You may not have much control over the former set of numbers, but the latter set involves your turf. You can do something about poor or non-existent operator training.