Our first question this month enquires on SWL weights on Static Shelving Storage and our second question asks for guidance on Long Span Shelving.
Static Shelving Storage
Q. I am wondering if you can help me. I have some very old static shelving racks (They are not pallet Racks). They don’t have any SWL or UDL weights on them and I was wondering if that is a requirement on this type of shelving as some of them are holding stock which is quite heavy?
Hoping you can help as there is not much info on this out there.
A. To clarify the issue there is no specific law that we are aware of that requires a load notice to be fitted. The crunch is however, that you are required as an employer to inform your operatives how to use the system safely and if you cannot tell them what is the maximum load that they can apply to each shelf and each bay then it is difficult to see how you are fulfilling this requirement. The easiest way to prove that you have given this information to your employees is to provide a load sign.
As far as the need to do this on low furniture style rise shelving is concerned then this boils down to your risk assessment which should include the consequences of a collapse. From what you say about the weight of products stored it sounds as it would be foolish not to have such load signs present.
Long Span Shelving
Q. Can you please provide guidance on the following: Albeit all work equipment falls under the current PUWER regulations a question keeps arising in “does long span shelving” require formal inspection by an accredited SEMA inspector. I have searched your website and cannot find any guidance other than the design and manufacturing specifications. Any help will be gladly received.
A. There are no specific rules that differentiate longspan shelving from pallet racking so it does boil down to some degree to your site specific risk assessment for your particular application. The following might be issues that you need to consider and I am sure there will be more however these might be a good start.
It is taken as read that longspan will be hand loaded and offloaded only, and is not suitable for loading or unloading with mechanical equipment such as fork trucks. It is often assumed that because it is relatively low rise the effect of a collapse would be less and while this might be so, a longspan rack collapsing on top of someone can cause serious injury and in some circumstances can be life threatening.
Longspan uprights are normally made from much thinner materials than pallet racking so are more susceptible to damage particularly from mechanical equipment such as trucks or order pickers. Hand Pallet trucks loaded with say a one tonne pallet can also do considerable damage if used by a careless operator ‘ and hand pulled ‘pick cages’ can do similar damage in a rapid moving environment.
Sometimes operations are organised such there are barriers to prevent heavy equipment approaching the shelving and this could be one way of mitigating the risk however as we said it comes down to the site specific risk assessment.
A final comment would be that if inspections are not being carried out regularly it is easy for bad practice to creep in and by the time damage is discovered it may have progressed to a serious level which can then be very expensive to rectify!
SEMA has a code of practice on load notices
http://www.sema.org.uk/page.asp?n ode=2 which gives recommendation on the information that should be on a load notice.
The HSE publication HSG76 also gives some guidance
http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/book s/hsg76.htm.
SEMA
Comments are closed.