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This video seems to show a minor bump by a fork lift causing multiple rows of shelving to collapse, burying the fork lift and operator.

Is this a real incident, or a faked video? The video has been posted on many news sites, but I can't find anything (even on Snopes) about where it happened.

Still from the alleged video

It's possible that the video is of an incident in 2016 at a cheese warehouse in Shropshire; the shelving looks to be of a similar design, but the colours don't match.

Evan Carroll
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Paul Johnson
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    On one hand, if it's real, somebody's failed real hard on constructing those shelves and deserves a life sentence for intentionally placing a death trap at the workspace. On the other, if it's fake, how was it filmed? – John Dvorak Mar 11 '19 at 16:14
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    Definitely not the cheese warehouse as this article says there were no CCTV cameras in use there. https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/local-hubs/north-shropshire/market-drayton/2018/06/22/shropshire-fire-chief-describes-dramatic-rescue-of-warehouse-worker-trapped-under-tonnes-of-cheese/ – Legion600 Mar 11 '19 at 16:52
  • I'm wondering if someone saw articles about the Shropshire cheese warehouse and created the video. – Paul Johnson Mar 11 '19 at 17:34
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    The timestamp says "04 07 2017 Tues" which means it's supposed to be July 4th, 2017. The first known instance of this video online was November 18th, 2018 at the Facebook link shown in the images [here](https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/world/amaz-in-forklift-driver-causes-an-entire-warehouse-to-fall-like-dominoes-when-he-nudges-a-shelving-unit/ar-BBPUTEf). – Laurel Mar 11 '19 at 18:27
  • @Laurel Could it not also be April 7? –  Mar 11 '19 at 20:22
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    @fredsbend That's a Friday, so no. – Laurel Mar 11 '19 at 20:24
  • @Laurel Ah, yes, I didn't think about the day of the week. –  Mar 11 '19 at 20:25
  • I think its not the cheese warehouse because in the video one can clearly see pallets of bottles and not only paper boxes – undefined Mar 12 '19 at 10:35
  • As someone with a fork lift certificate, I know videos like this are often shown on during courses. Regardless of whether it was a video of that particular incident, it looks real enough to be a video of *an* incident. Unfortunately, incidents like that still happen and in the past have happened way more than they should. – Mast Mar 12 '19 at 10:43
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    I can't vet this actual video, but I've personally witnessed a similar collapse and this video is pretty much identical to what I saw. This video could have emerged from a "warehouse safety" source which anonymized the source so companies would be willing to share the footage without branding themselves as flawed. – Flater Mar 12 '19 at 10:55
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    I was unable to find any evidence of where this incident happened, but it appears that the forklift is a Jungheinrich ETV, which means it happened in Europe. – Avery Mar 16 '19 at 00:40
  • [This reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/nononono/comments/9ybni5/thought_you_were_having_a_bad_day/) (2018-11-18) looks like the earliest appearance of it that I've found. – Nat Mar 16 '19 at 23:05

1 Answers1

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I do not know if this video depicts a real incident, but it does show one type of disaster that can happen in a warehouse with overloaded shelves. I don't see any reason to believe it was faked.

The Daily Mail says that the video was uploaded to youtube without any description of where it happened. They are asking the public if they know where the footage was filmed.

The time stamp on the footage indicates it was taken in July of 2017. This Reddit thread has identified a couple of incidents that it is NOT. It is not the 2016 collapse of shelving in a cheese warehouse in Shropshire, England. Nor was it the 2016 collapse of shelving in Manassas, Virginia. Nor was it this incident in Russia. All three of these incidents show a cascading collapse of shelves caused by a small bump from a forklift.

The type of failure that started the shelving collapse is called buckling. The beams that support the shelves are loaded in compression. If the compression force is high enough and the beam is pushed out to the side a little, it can trigger a sudden collapse. Once a single support buckles, the load it was carrying is transferred to adjacent beams, and they collapse as well. Shelves are designed to hold up a certain amount of load before buckling becomes an danger.

If the warehouse manager exceeds that load, this can happen. It is quite possible that the warehouse managers were negligent and there are criminal or civil cases tied to this collapse.

BobTheAverage
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    It should be noted that a setup like this, with little protection against shelving collapse, would almost certainly be in violation of OHSA regulations in the US, making it unlikely the video is from the US. (I say "unlikely" because OHSA violations do occur, but one as egregious as this would be hard to keep hidden.) – Daniel R Hicks Mar 11 '19 at 19:57
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    @DanielRHicks One of the three linked incidents was in the US. Another was in the UK, which I assume has its own version of OSHA. I do not think your comment is accurate. – BobTheAverage Mar 11 '19 at 20:24
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    I'm not saying that shelving collapse incidents don't occur in the US, I'm just saying that such a massive collapse would surely be the result of multiple violations of regulations. – Daniel R Hicks Mar 11 '19 at 20:27
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    The better argument for it likely not having occurred in the US is that the date stamp in the video is day/month/year - which is common almost everywhere BUT the US, where the most common style is month/day/year. – cpcodes Mar 11 '19 at 23:25
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    @DanielRHicks, everywhere around the world has their equivalent of OHSA, and everywhere there are managers who tolerate or even order violating it. Some places have more of them (and less oversight), but all places have some, including the USA. – Jan Hudec Mar 12 '19 at 06:36
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    The user who uploaded that video has a user name and other uploaded videos that imply he is a South African. There is a South African company called Makro, a wholesaler to the public (now part of MassMart), which has yellow staff uniforms like the shirts the guys in the video are wearing. – mccdyl001 Mar 12 '19 at 10:12
  • A "minor bump" from a forklift still means enough force to push the shelves in by >~10% of the width of the forklift - say 8cm. It's not surprising as those things are heavy: most of the bulk is full of lead-acid batteries and motors, and the structure is thick steel - this all acts as a counterweight when the forks are loaded. Overloading wouldn't have helped and there was certainly a lot of load - look how much the forklift is pushed sideways by the falling goods even though the racking doesn't kick much, but I'm not sure you even need overloading or insufficient crossbracing to explain it – Chris H Mar 12 '19 at 10:36
  • @DanielRHicks Unless you have a citation to regulations I wouldn't be so certain that the design is illegal, or depending on details of the regulations they could be in an intermediate state of only being prohibited for new construction. A related example is that ~1 in 30 road bridges in the US were built with obsolete fracture critical designs that could collapse due to damage to a single component. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/bridges-need-repair/2816881/ – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight Mar 12 '19 at 13:54
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    @ChrisH My professional background is in structural engineering. When we build structures to support loads, we have to design for ALL probable loads. Over the lifetime of this warehouse, a thousand sleepy drivers will bump into a thousand shelves. Any design that cannot hold both its design load and any incidental loads is a failure. For a support to buckle it has to be compressed more than its critical buckling load, which apparently these were. – BobTheAverage Mar 12 '19 at 15:50
  • @BobTheAverage of course, but the key words here are "probable" and "incidental". Clearly somone screwed up (and I don't just mean the driver) but whether that was the person who specified the setup or the person who specified the loading at the time of the accident is another question. – Chris H Mar 12 '19 at 16:08
  • I think a better description of this involves the sheering force of a shelf, as compared to the compressive force. Those shelves didn't buckle. [They sheared.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shear_force) You could probably stack twice that load on the commercial shelves, and have total stablity. But freestanding shelves generally speaking can't take any shearing force, and that's what the forklift brought into the mix. – Evan Carroll Mar 16 '19 at 02:45
  • @EvanCarroll Look closely at the video. The bottom beam in each vertical support goes out to the side right before each support collapses. That is buckling. Remember that in long slender beams, shear stress is typically negligible compared to the normal stresses caused by bending. Don't confuse a transverse load with shear stress. – BobTheAverage Mar 16 '19 at 16:38
  • @BobTheAverage I honestly don't know for certain. Don't listen to me. I'm not an expert at that. But the stability prior to the unequal force brought by the fork lift leads me to believe that it's a shear force that *caused* the failure mode. Think a toothpick that that can withstand infinitive compressive force holding the world up, taking a flick to the center sending it buckling. That would be shear force, right? https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/466862/325 – Evan Carroll Mar 16 '19 at 21:57
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    @EvanCarroll When structural engineers talk about forces on long slender beams, we talk about axial and transverse forces; parallel and perpendicular to the beam respectively. A transverse force will cause some shear stress, but also create a torque that creates both compressive and tension stresses. Buckling happens when a beam is in compression, and the middle of the beam is pushed out to the side past a certain critical point; At that point, the compressive forces wind up pushing the beam further to the side and a feedback loop starts triggering a sudden collapse. – BobTheAverage Mar 16 '19 at 23:47