forklift training and accident videos

Tandem lifting forklift truck accident 

Talk about Déjà Vu. The almost exact accident that you can see below happened to me in 1979 when I worked for Yale Forklifts at Wednesfield in the West Midlands.

Yale were about to start marketing a large forklift called the GDP140 which was actually manufactured by Sumitomo in Japan.

The prototype arrived on the back of a lorry one Friday afternoon at a time when the works were on annual holiday shutdown. Consequently there was no one available to get the truck off the back of the lorry.

My colleague Dave Gillespie and I decided we would do it despite having very limited experience of operating forklifts. We obtained a forklift each and did exactly what is shown in the video below with almost exactly the same results. The only difference was that my truck also ended up on it's side as well as the one we were trying to handle.

Not long after this, thanks to two very understanding bosses, I was promoted to Training Manager and became responsible for the whole of forklift operator training for Yale in the UK. When I asked the boss, "why the promotion?", he said, "cause you will never do that again will you"? What a boss! Are you still around Chris Goode?

This incident left a lasting impression on me as you can imagine and here I am, retired and forty years later, still trying to promote forklift safety.