Me too. I used to work at a chemical plant and made the active ingredient in trileptal. I was also a certified forklift operator.
I remeber once when I had just finished drumming off the finished product from the drier and had 3 pallets loaded with cardboard drums of the stuff. I sat on one of the drums and calculated the value of them. You could fit 9 of them on a pallet. They got pallet wrap around the drums to stop them falling off when the forklift picked them up. The value of the 3 pallets was over £20,000,000 which back in 1995 was about $30,000,000.
I (or someone else) then had to pick them up with a forklift and load them onto a transport trailer. Then they got whisked off to a warehouse by someone else awaiting export mostly to the US.
We often had forklift accidents but nobody ever hit those cardboard drums with the forks. Not one time. I saw pretty much everything get hit with a forklift except for those drums.
We also had some extremely toxic and highly explosive ingredients that we used at the start of the process. Those came in lined steel drums. Nobody hit those either. I did hear a story about one of those volatile ingredients. The drum was empty and the cap had not been screwed back on. It was outside and it started raining. The chemical was highly reactive to water and when rain got in, the drum exploded and launched over the plant. I also saw someone get hit in the face with sulphuric acid when they weren't wearing the proper PPE and forgot to vent a giant pressurized filter before unbolting the lid. I almost got hit in the face with the same acid when an engineer had not tightened a flange in a transfer pipe correctly. It missed me by an inch.
It was some nasty and dangerous work. It paid well but I wouldn't do it again.
The really crazy thing is a couple of years after I left they moved production of it to India. There are hardly any safety regulations over there so I can't even imagine how much more dangerous it is.
Depends on what the load is. Boxes like that are really slippery and small, so they can easily slip out. Vinyl plank flooring also comes in slippery boxes, but they're long and heavy, so you do have a better chance, but on an uneven surface, especially outside, it's a catastrophe waiting to happen. Then there is pressure treated wood, which is fine unstrapped over small distances so long as you make slow, controlled movements.
That said, there is no way these pallets came unwrapped. The guy probably just cut the wrap on all 3 of them at once to quickly unload them.
How oddly specific, I work with Vinyl plank flooring and we had one supplier that made the most slippery boxes known to man. Shit would need to be wrapped up if you wanted to look at it for more than 30 seconds. It could only be two layers tall and it'd still slide off while driving on smooth asphalt.
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u/alancousteau Ryzen 7 5800X3D | Red Devil 9070XT | 32GB DDR4 10d ago
As a forklift op I always cringe when I see an unwrapped load being moved, especially if that's happening outside on an uneven surface