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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.

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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
    Commented Mar 11, 2019 at 16:14
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    Definitely not the cheese warehouse as this article says there were no CCTV cameras in use there. shropshirestar.com/news/local-hubs/north-shropshire/…
    – Legion600
    Commented Mar 11, 2019 at 16:52
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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.
    – Laurel
    Commented Mar 11, 2019 at 18:27
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    @fredsbend That's a Friday, so no.
    – Laurel
    Commented Mar 11, 2019 at 20:24
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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
    Commented Mar 12, 2019 at 10:55

1 Answer 1

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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.

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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
    Commented Mar 11, 2019 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
    Commented Mar 11, 2019 at 20:24
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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
    Commented Mar 11, 2019 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
    Commented Mar 12, 2019 at 6:36
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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
    Commented Mar 12, 2019 at 10:12

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