Excellent Wheel Chocks Can Prevent Serious Dock-Area Injuries
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Very often, the most potentially hazardous part of an industrial facility is its loading dock area. There are two key reasons for this: 1) There’s often a lot of movement involving extremely heavy vehicles, especially fork trucks and semi trucks; and 2) Some of the people operating these vehicles (drivers of visiting trucks) are not your employees, and consequently you have no idea how well trained they are and how diligent they are with regard to vehicle-operating safety. One of the most potentially dangerous incidents that can happen in a loading dock area is a roll-away truck. This hazardous occurrence is exactly what its name suggests: a truck weighing many, many tons becoming dislodged from its parked position at a dock and rolling forward with no driver at the wheel. Please take a few moments to read the following brief article concerning
wheel chocks, which are dock-area equipment that’s essential to preventing the occurrence of a roll-away truck.
The function of
wheel chocks is to ensure that trucks and semi trailers remain secure when parked in loading dock areas. An essential piece of
material handling equipment for loading docks, the trailer
wheel chock is a heavy-duty wedge designed to be placed under a truck or trailer wheel to keep those wheels from moving while the vehicle is parked at a dock. These can be constructed of different extremely study materials; there are molded
rubber chocks,
steel chocks, aluminum chocks, and urethane chocks. In addition, a high-quality
rubber chock, also known as a
rubber wedge, also can be made of either laminated rubber or extruded rubber. Some available models of
wheel chocks have an added safety feature: They are painted bright orange for optimum visibility.
In addition, various types of wheel chocks have features to ensure that they have the best possible grip on truck tires. Top-quality urethane wheel chocks feature a safety tread on the chock face.
Rubber wedges, including the molded
rubber chock models, have excellent grip via the fact that their contact with tires is rubber on rubber. High-quality steel
wheel chock models feature a textured treadplate and a saw-tooth bottom that that together work to provide excellent traction. In addition, the best steel wheel chocks feature an open-face radius that allows these wheel chocks to be utilized with tires of any size. Regardless of what materials they are constructed with, virtually all wheel chocks are available in a variety of sizes to accommodate the difference in truck wheel sizes.
When one considers the types of very hazardous accidents that they are designed to prevent, wheel chocks are extraordinarily inexpensive and highly cost-effective loading dock equipment. In addition to the prevention of serious human injury, they also work to save industrial businesses considerable amounts of money in health care costs, worker’s compensation claims, and dollars spent to repair the extensive property damage that a roll-away truck occurrence is capable of causing. Wheel chocks thus are absolutely essential loading dock equipment, and no industrial business that has a loading dock area should operate without them. It is the customer’s responsibility to verify correctness of fit for applications.
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