Pallet Jack Flash

I was recently hired as an expert witness in a lawsuit involving a forklift accident. Without divulging too much about the parties involved, let’s just say the shyster lawyer for the plaintiff homed in on a simple and much overlooked aspect of lift truck safety; the maintenance and replacement of safety labels and decals. The lawyer railed against the fact that the owner/driver of the lift truck did not follow some basic warnings laid out in one of the safety tags, namely, avoiding overloading the trucks’ rated capacity. This is why they must be adhered to and maintained. The bad news is that they get poorer in quality all the time.

I just taught a class where the forklift was brand new and I can tell you that thing was covered with safety decals a’plenty. It’s a shame really, that in our culture, a lack of basic common sense and uber-litigiousness have caused us to put “DANGER” “substance is WET” on a glass of water! It would seem to me that we are short circuiting Darwin’s theory a bit by not allowing the truly stupid to simply kill themselves off. If evolution is true, then by plastering safety decals on every moving component of our society, we are dumbing down the very instinct needed for survival: Dumb gazelle drinks at the watering hole blindly in front of lion. Lion kills gazelle. Lion eats gazelle. Dumb gazelle gene fails to get passed on. Simple.

That being said, some things are not so clear and thus REALLY DO need a warning label. For example, many smart people simply don’t know not to drive a forklift into certain types of trucks or the hazards associated with liquid propane gas. Labels wear off due to pressure washing, gas spills, and just down right everyday abuse and wear and tear. For that reason, we use Drake Industries, www.Drake.com  for all our labels.