"It Was Only Blocked for a few Minutes"

In warehousing and operations, none of us begin our shifts planning to create risk or endanger someone. Most of us show up, jump on the forklift, our rider pallet jacks, or another piece of powered industrial equipment, to put away pallets, run freight across the dock, build loads, and try to hit our numbers. We hear the safety rules during orientation, we sign the training sheets, we watch the videos. And then we get comfortable. We convince ourselves that “just this once,” or “just for a few minutes” won’t hurt anything. Until it does.

I’m Marty and today here at Warehouse and Operations as a Career I want to talk about a real scenario. A young forklift operator lost her job because she placed a stack of pallets in front of an egress doorway. She felt wronged. Her reasoning?
It was only going to be there for a few minutes. I was going to move a few things around and would have come right back.

She had been trained not to block doorways, exits, electrical panels, and fire extinguishers. She understood it in theory. But she didn’t understand why the rule was there. And that is the key difference between training and comprehension. Between compliance and belief. Between I heard you say it and I understand why doing it matters.

In our industry, the difference between those two mindsets determines careers, safety, and sometimes even lives.

 Let’s begin with something easy to understand. Warehouse safety regulations exist because someone, somewhere, died or was severely injured before they were written. No safety standard, especially those around emergency exits, came from a textbook. They came from tragedy. Blocking egress routes, doorways, exit paths, hallways, or marked access points, has been a contributing factor in warehouse fatalities, factory fires, mass casualty incidents, and evacuation failures. In high-risk environments, you cannot predict when the emergency will come. You only know that if it does, people must be able to get out.

When OSHA, the fire marshal, or an insurance company says Do not block exits, they aren’t being bureaucratic. They’re telling us history has proven that someone WILL eventually need that doorway in a moment they did not expect.

Let’s take our forklift operator. She put those pallets there temporarily. In her mind, temporarily meant harmless. But here is the reality, Emergencies don’t wait until you’ve moved your pallets. Fires don’t pause. Workers don’t stop breathing because you need three more minutes to finish your task. Someone having a panic attack or a medical emergency doesn’t get to choose a different exit. And in the worst case, a forklift battery explosion, a flash fire, a pallet collapse, well, seconds are going to matter.

Imagine this, A fire starts thirty feet away. A worker runs to the nearest exit, the same one blocked by her pallets, and they cannot push through. That delay, one or two seconds, might be the difference between smoke inhalation and survival.

Suddenly just a few minutes isn’t a harmless mistake. It’s life-changing.

One of the hardest lessons I’ve watched workers go through is the realization that danger never announces itself.  We forklift operators spend hundreds of hours moving pallets around. We get comfortable. We get to moving fast. We develop their rhythms and our shortcuts. And shortcuts are where careers end.

I heard once that a shortcut is a decision built on the belief that risk is low, but made without proof. There is no risk assessment. There is no redundancy. There is only the operator’s personal confidence. But confidence is not the same as being right.

Blocking an exit, stacking pallets where they shouldn’t be, driving faster because no one is looking, those aren’t skill-based decisions. They’re complacency-based decisions.

And like we learned about 6 weeks ago with episode #337 titled The Cost of Comfort and Complacency is that complacency ends careers.

Companies don’t train us because they are trying to check a box. Not in warehousing. Not in distribution. Not in our light industrial environments where 11,000-pound lift trucks are working around humans every minute.

When you go through PIT training, when you sign the safety sheets, when the manager says Do not block emergency exits, that is a contract. The company is investing in our safety. The company is protecting the other employees. The company is following regulations.

And by acknowledging that training, you are agreeing to follow those standards.

One thing I remind new associates is, when you violate safety rules, you don’t just break the rule, you break the trust that permitted you to operate equipment in the first place. That forklift is a privilege, not a right. A license to operate PIT equipment was earned. It is maintained and kept through our behavior.

You can be the fastest replenisher on the night shift. You can be the best put-away driver in the building. If you block an exit, you have demonstrated to leadership that you value speed over safety. And no company will tolerate that.

It’s important for us to remember that warehouses are not just workplaces, they are regulated environments. OSHA standards are not guidelines. They are mandatory requirements. If a facility allows blocked exits, that facility can be fined, investigated, or shut down.

If an employee is injured because an exit was blocked the company can be held liable, the manager, the supervisor, and we as the operator can be held liable.

That’s the uncomfortable truth. Our few minutes of pallets could cost a company millions of dollars, or cost someone their job, their home, or their career. In cases involving fatalities, people can go to prison. Not because they were malicious. Not because they wanted to hurt someone. But because the law recognizes that preventing access to emergency exits is negligent, reckless, and dangerous.

Some people hear a story like this and say, she should have gotten a warning. They didn’t have to fire her over that. But here’s what we have to remember. She was trained not to do it. She acknowledged the training. She violated a life-critical rule. Someone saw it before she corrected it. Had an emergency occurred, lives could have been at risk.

Companies cannot wait for the second violation when the first one clearly shows that the person is willing to gamble with safety.

Imagine hiring a truck driver who decides they don’t need to wear a seat belt because it slows them down getting in and out of the cab.
Do you wait until they crash to discipline them? No, you remove the risk before the tragedy. Firing her wasn’t punishment. It was prevention.

And I get it, some young warehouse associates and PIT operators look at rules through a personal lens. Is this slowing me down?, Is this inconvenient?, Is anyone watching? It’ll only be a minute. But supervisors, trainers, and safety managers think differently, and we need them thinking differently. Who will be harmed if this goes wrong? Will someone be able to escape? What risk does this create? What message does allowing this send to others?

Safety is not about the present moment, it is about that worst-case moment.

A forklift operator who blocks an exit is telling leadership, I understand the rule, but my time, my pallet, and my shortcut matter more than everyone’s safety. That is not a person you can trust with equipment.

I’ve seen many young operators get blindsided when decisions like this end their employment. They’ll say, they didn’t even give me a chance. I was just trying to work fast. I wasn’t hurting anyone. I didn’t think it was a big deal. But that last statement I didn’t think it was a big deal is the reason they’re let go. Safety programs are built on the assumption that associates understand the seriousness of the rules. Not that they can be persuaded to obey them. Companies cannot risk people who don’t think blocking exits is a big deal.
And they cannot gamble that a worst-case scenario won’t happen.

That forklift operator may feel wronged, but she was fired for the same reason someone would be fired for driving a forklift while lifting someone on a pallet, operating equipment without a harness at height, Removing the guard on a machine, smoking near propane tanks or ignoring lockout/tagout procedures. Each one of those behaviors is a small decision with catastrophic potential. Companies must act before catastrophe, not after.

You’ve heard me say it before and I’ll say it again. Warehouse and light industrial work isn’t about simply getting the doors opened and closed for our shift. It’s about doing it the right way.

There are rules that are flexible, like whether a pallet is stowed in location A or location B.
But safety rules are not up for negotiation. No horseplay. No racing forklifts. No blocking egress routes. No disabling horns or alarms. No driving with obstructed visibility. And no storing pallets against fire extinguishers. These aren’t annoyances. They’re the foundation of professionalism and a culture of safety.

The best operators in the industry understand this. They know that anyone can make numbers. The people who build careers are the ones who make numbers and keep everyone safe while doing it.

I’m sure we have all learned that rules exist because someone didn’t follow them once. Standards exist because someone paid the price. As an operator we see pallets and a doorway. Leaders see risk, liability, and potential tragedy.

When we block an exit, even for two minutes, we are gambling with lives you will never meet, for reasons that will never matter in hindsight. Warehouse safety isn’t about intent. It’s about consequences. And when the consequence could be someone not getting out in time, there is no such thing as only for a few minutes. I know that sounds harsh but it’s factual. We’ve been trained, and accepted the position, and it’s on us to be accountable right?

People losing their position is always a tough subject. I’ve been told by many that it’s a good thing sometimes. I hope that both parties learn from it.  Anyway, there’s a few of my thoughts on the subject. Until next week, Lets focus on being professional, being productive, and above all, being safe both at home and at work.