13th Annual Forklift Rally Knocks It Out Of The Park!
It was Saturday May 1st, 2010 and with almost 90 competitors and 500 people in attendance many said the 13th Annual BC Championship Forklift Rally felt like an all day party!
For all the details & pictures head over to ForkliftRally.com.
CMHDS Promotes Health & Safety to West Coast Logistics Community
CMHDS Expands NAOSH Week Involvement and Becomes NAOSH Week 2010 Supporter – The Canadian Material Handling & Distribution Society (CMHDS) is pleased to announce that it is expanding its emphasis on occupational health and safety through becoming an official NAOSH Week Supporter for the NAOSH Week 2010 campaign. CMHDS has previously supported NAOSH Week (branded in B.C. as ‘Safety and Health Week in B.C.’) and workplace safety through its annual BC Championship Forklift Rally (www.ForkliftRally.com), which is held in conjunction with NAOSH Week. This year will mark the 13th Annual Forklift Rally, with plans actively underway to add a new elite championship for competitors from BC, Washington and Oregon. Some CMHDS member companies, including Versacold and EV Logistics, already actively participate in NAOSH week, and have found it to be extremely valuable in promoting workplace safety in their operations.
What Came First, The Pallet or the Lift Truck?
This question, posed decades ago by the earliest pallet industry pioneers such as the late Bill Sardo, still comes up today. The correct answer depends on how we define “pallet.”
Pallet-like structures have been used as bases for at least a few hundred years for applications such as the safe stacking and stabilization of kegs. Let’s look at the Dictionary.com definition, which describes a pallet as “a small, low, portable platform on which goods are placed for storage or moving, as in a warehouse or vehicle.”
If one is to follow the definition at Dictionary.com, then these structures were pallets in that they were used for storage, and they did indeed predate the lift truck. They did not, however, facilitate movement of goods, which most professional definitions for pallets would prescribe to be an important part of the definition. The appearance of unit-load bases designed to move goods takes us to to the very late 1800s. The predecessor of the wooden pallet was the wooden (and iron or steel) skid, which consisted of stringers or legs fastened to a top deck. It first appeared in American factories in conjunction with the low lift truck. A crude low lift hand truck was invented in 1887 that could elevate a skid a few inches by manual means. A more durable, all-steel low lift truck design was introduced in 1909. Early lift trucks had a lift platform. The appearance of forks came later. Skids were classified as “live,” containing casters on the base for manual positioning of the skid, or “dead” if they did not have casters.
