Warehouse workers face dangers that can easily cause serious injury. With the right procedures and design choices in place, it’s possible to mitigate many of these issues — but only if organizations know what to look for.

Warehouse workers face dangers that can easily cause serious injury. With the right procedures and design choices in place, it's possible to mitigate many of these issues — but only if organizations know what to look for. 

Industrial fire safety is a necessary part of any industrial warehouse and manufacturing plant, though fires and explosions vary from causes and severity. As industrial fire protection standards improve each year, safety and health professionals want to ensure the best practices on how to prevent fires and explosions. 

Warehouses are home to all sorts of technology and machinery, but their most valuable occupant is also perhaps the most vulnerable: human employees. When it comes to ensuring the safety of warehouse workers, shortcuts aren't an option. Warehousing has a higher fatal injury rate than the national average across all industries.

Employers across the world allow their employees to listen to music each day while on the job. Allowing workers to jam out can boost workplace morale, job satisfaction and productivity. Listening to music is increasingly popular in construction-related fields since canceling out loud noise is required to protect hearing. The problem is that listening to tunes while performing high-risk jobs can often lead to unfortunate accidents.

The agency cited owner Shawn Purvis of Purvis Home Improvement Company, Inc. for 17 willful and serious safety violations, including failure to provide fall protection training and exposure to electrocution. Portland, Maine's grand jury also indicted Purvis on April 5, 2019 for manslaughter and workplace manslaughter. If convicted, he will face an additional $50,000 fine and 30 years in prison.

Workplace accidents are, unfortunately, a frequent occurrence. An employee is hurt on the job every seven seconds, according to one study, around 4.6 million people each year. Some common injuries include soreness, sprains and lacerations, mainly due to overexertion, slips, falls and trips. Nevertheless, reducing injuries and fatalities is a priority for many industries.

Amazon operates on-site emergency clinics, named AmCare, for workers. The idea is that employees can go to those facilities, which have on-staff, licensed emergency medical technicians and injury prevention specialists, and get treated faster without needing to travel off-site. As convenient as this may sound, however, reports suggest there are some issues with that approach. Here are some of them.

Reducing workplace injuries is an ongoing concern for industrial companies. Some enterprises believe business intelligence (BI) systems could help them meet that goal. BI looks at descriptive analytics, which show what happened in the past. Enterprises then may apply predictive analytics to the findings from BI software to determine how to improve safety.

Heavy equipment transportation is a serious task that's dangerous if not performed correctly. However, it's a necessary one. In the U.S., commercial vehicles make up 4.6% of all registered vehicles, yet account for 10% of miles traveled. Businesses rely on commercial transportation to ship heavy equipment from one place to another.