Dock Truck Restraints Prevent Premature Departure
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As industrial accident statistics clearly attest, loading dock areas are potentially very dangerous. A variety of different injury-causing mishaps can and do happen, and it’s not a rare occurrence that some of these injuries are very serious and even fatal. Semi-trucks entering your loading dock area obviously are huge, very often extremely heavy, and, far more often than not, are driven by people you don’t know and have not trained. In short, you have someone operating a very dangerous piece of equipment on your property and have no idea of this person’s expertise or diligence. This is a clear recipe for a potential tragedy, which of course is the last thing you want to happen on your company’s grounds. So please take a few moments to read the following succinct article to learn a key way to dramatically lessen the chances of a serious injury or tragedy occurring at your facility’s dock area.
Purchasing all relevant, high-quality dock safety equipment clearly is vital to maintaining a safe loading dock area. One absolutely essential type of material handling dock safety equipment is
dock truck restraints.
Truck restraints anchor directly to the dock and latch onto either the trailer’s ICC bar or rear impact guard (RIG) to hold the trailer firmly in place while it is being loaded or unloaded at the dock. The
truck restraint is designed only for legal ICC bars or rear impact guard (RIG). There are two basic models of this vital equipment: the
manual truck restraint and the electric
hydraulic truck restraint. Both types of
truck restraints work equally well in ensuring that a truck remains absolutely stationary at the dock until the unloading/loading is complete and the driver has been given a clear go-ahead to pull out.
Truck restraints prevent several dangerous and potentially tragic dock-area occurrences from happening. Two of these occurrences are early driver departure and trailer creep. Clearly, a driver pulling away from the dock while unloading/loading is still going on creates a huge potential hazard for dock workers.
Dock truck restraints maintains a firm grip on the trailer’s rear portion will prevent a driver from moving his truck prematurely. Trailer creep refers to the gradual, inch-by-inch movement of a trailer away from a dock, with this movement usually caused by the momentum of repeated forklift crossings from the dock onto the truck bed. The firm grip of mechanical
dock restraints prevents this, which can result in the potentially disastrous occurrence of a fork truck, with driver on board, falling forward into the gap created by the trailer creep.
A third potentially injury-causing occurrence that a dock truck restraint, when coupled with the use of a trailer jack stand, can prevent is trailer upending. This can occur when the trailer is separated from its rig at the dock area. Resembling a tilted seesaw, trailer upending typically is caused when a heavy load is placed at the trailer’s front end, causing its back end to rise up from the dock platform. If a forklift driver happens to be making a trailer-dock crossing when this occurs, the resulting forklift tipover/fall can cause potentially serious injury. The firm trailer-dock grip maintained by the
dock restraint eliminates the possibility of this occurring. It is the customer’s responsibility to verify correctness of fit for applications.
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