How to Spot Warehouse Door Safety Hazards
The Risks a Door Can Pose to Your Team – and What You Can Do to Stop Them
Summertime poses enough risks to team safety. Don’t let your facility doors add to the list.
This time of year affects warehouse doors as much as it does team efforts. Heat, bugs, and the constant opening/closing for product deliveries…it’s a recipe for door failures.
Let’s avoid those with a little safety reminder.
Weather Impacts Door Stability Every Day
Everyone goes inside to get out of Summer heat. Doors however face the heat every day.
What does the heat affect most? The door seals.
However, heat also dries out hinge grease, warps steel panels over time, and causes thinning in bug door screens. These impacts are less visible, more easily missed.
In the same vein, Summer winds can have an impact on bug doors. Over time, coupled with heat, winds can stretch bug doors out of shape.
The heat and the winds, coupled with frequent use, cause a number of stability risks over time:
- Door seals failing, letting in heat & pests
- Leaks around the door onto the dock and warehouse floor
- Breaks in bug door seams
- Rolling mechanism sticks, causing exposure to the elements (a product safety hazard)
- Rolling mechanism lets go (a crushing hazard)
Warning Signs for Unsafe Doors
Door stability degrades over time. Sometimes it “sneaks up” on us. But you can always spot warning signs if you keep an eye out for them.
- Loud noise. Doors will make unusually-loud noises if clogged, rusted, or warped out of shape.
- Idle time waiting on slow doors raising/lowering.
- Shuddering door panels when opening or at rest.
- Rubber piles near door frames, indicating a crumbling seal. (Creates a slipping hazard too.)
- Flapping rubber where a seal breaks. Chances are you’ve seen this one already!
Door Accidents That Come from Safety Hazards
What kind of accidents do these result in?
- Door gets stuck halfway, disrupting workflow, cutting off a usable dock.
- Seal pullback, causing environmental change inside the warehouse.
- Door chain snaps, whipping downward, striking workers or product.
- Forklift impact. The forklift’s moving too fast, the door’s moving too slow…and they collide.
- Pest infestation. Even small failures in bug doors let bugs in, damaging produce, and putting the facility in danger of a failed inspection.
These are all scenarios we’ve heard about from customers, when they call us for warehouse door repairs.
What You Can Do – Maintaining Warehouse Doors of All Types
How do we mitigate these safety hazards?
First and foremost, schedule preventative maintenance for your docks & doors.
- Moderate use: have doors serviced twice a year.
- Heavy use: have doors serviced every quarter.
Maintenance techs should check all seals, inspect door material & joints, service the roller and all hinges, and do stability tests.
Second, ask team leads to check doors as part of their safety checks (if they don’t already). Use the above criteria to guide the checks. It should only take 2 minutes a door.
Third, treat door safety like floor safety. Every workflow links to a warehouse door…so the safety checks for each workflow must include its door.
Like every other aspect of team safety, warehouse doors can present a safety hazard, but it’s an easy one to handle.
Until next month!
-The Cromer Team
Cromer Material Handling
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