A racking collapse can kill in a second and topple entire rows like dominoes. The truck driver loads and hits racking daily, so you must know the racking's load limits, safe stacking and the traffic light system (green/yellow/red) for damage assessment per DS/EN 15635 — and know what you do when you have hit a post.
Introduction
A fully loaded pallet racking bears many tonnes of goods several metres up. If one load-bearing post goes, the entire section — and often adjacent sections — can collapse in a chain reaction. The two most common causes are that the rack is overloaded, and that it has been hit by a truck and weakened without the damage being detected. Both are things the truck driver is close to every day.
The shelf's parts and how it supports
A typical pallet rack consists of vertical gables (frames with two uprights and diagonals) and horizontal beams (stringers), which the pallets rest on. The load is carried from the beams down into the uprights and further into the floor via the base plates, which are bolted down. The upright at the bottom — the bottom few metres, where the truck drives — is both the most heavily loaded and the most exposed to impact damage. A dented or bent upright has far less load-bearing capacity than a straight one, because a column under compression loses strength dramatically once it begins to bend outward.
Load: always read the shelf tag
A rack is dimensioned for a specific load per beam pair (pallet bay) and a total load per section — calculated according to DS/EN 15512 (design of pallet racks) and erected within the tolerances of DS/EN 15620. The permitted load is shown on a load plate, which DS/EN 15635 requires to be posted visibly on the rack. Never exceed it, and never make up a figure yourself.
Safe stacking
- 01Place the pallet in the middle of the beams so both beams bear — not skewed to one side.
- 02Put heavy pallets at the bottom and lighter goods higher up to keep the centre of gravity low.
- 03Load only pallets that are whole and stable in the rack — a broken pallet can slip or fall through (see the post about pallets and load carriers).
- 04Do not exceed the field's permitted load, and do not fill the beam with more pallets than it is designed for.
- 05Push the pallet in smoothly and horizontally and set it down gently — hard impacts on beam or upright are the source of rack damage.
- 06Maintain clearance over the pallet so you don't push the beam over yourself or tip goods backwards when setting down.
Hit-and-run injuries — the great threat
A truck that merely grazes a post in passing can leave a dent that halves the post's load capacity without the driver noticing. Therefore two things apply: prevent with reduced speed, good visibility and impact protection (post guards and gable guards of steel or yielding plastic), and ALWAYS report a collision — even a small one — so the damage can be assessed. Unreported collisions are a major reason why shelving collapses apparently 'by itself'.
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