Mezzanine Safety: Tips for Keeping Mezzanines in Your Facility Safe

A mezzanine is a smart idea for many facilities. This seemingly simple, yet ingeniously efficient, half-floor wedged between levels increases your facility’s storage and/or work area, allowing more for our businesses than we may realize.

However, mezzanines are intrinsically dangerous places. Have no doubt; our greatest responsibility is to our employees’ safety. Being knowledgeable about mezzanine safety will enable you to construct, implement, and maintain an efficient Safety Policy perfectly tailored to your facility’s needs.

Mezzanines are exposed halfway platforms suspended between floors, busy with personnel, product traffic and stowage. It should come as no surprise, then, that many tragic—yet often preventable—workplace accidents take place in mezzanine areas. Incidents can occur from above or below, due to falls, drops, and slippages. Such accidents can result in millions of dollars of lost annual revenue due to employee accidents and fatalities, compensatory damages, litigation, and safety code violations.

Mezzanine Safety Tips

However, the majority of these unfortunate occurrences can be prevented by following several easy, yet critical, Tips for Mezzanine Safety:

• Implement, maintain, and educate your staff on an in-house Safety Policy. Ensure all personnel are educated on your company’s safety policy. And remember: if the rules are simple and easy to implement, employee compliance will increase.
• ALL internal Safety Regulations should adhere to your industry’s federal and local safety guidelines (OSHA, IBC, ANSI), be visibly posted, and written in such a way as to be easily interpretable by all employees.
• All safety equipment necessary to satisfy the above-mentioned Guidelines should be up-to-date with and adhere to Code, properly installed, and inspected periodically, per guidelines.
• Know and Respect the stated weight capacity of any mezzanine work platform. Strictly adhere to it when storing product and/or equipment and when personnel are present.
• Maintain a clutter-free, well-lit work area. Work floors/platforms should be swept free of debris to lower the risk of slips and falls. If applicable, slippage-reducing flooring should be utilized. Adequate lighting should be installed to increase overall visibility. All products/packages and machinery should be securely stowed to prevent slippage or collapse.
• Install proper safety gates on all facility mezzanines. Mezzanine Safety Gates are perhaps the single most effective way to improve mezzanine safety and keep your crew safe, prevent falls, and avoid costly fines.
• The safety gate you choose should be crafted by a trusted company, meet or exceed all industry safety standards (OSHA, IBC, ANSI), be crafted from quality and durable materials, install simply, be self-closing and user-friendly, and—most importantly—keep everyone safe!

It is up to you know what the safety rules are; to construct or purchase any required safety equipment; to develop and implement a company-wide safety plan. No easy feats! Thankfully, there is a company that can help.

At Fabenco, we’ve devoted over 45 years to help ensure that your workforce is safe and that your business is healthy. Proudly and expertly crafted here in the USA, ALL of Fabenco’s self-closing safety gates meet or exceed ever-changing OSHA, ANSI, and IBC safety regulations. Our fall protection products are crafted from the finest materials, ship smartly, and assemble easily on-site using basic tools your facility already has on hand. In addition, our innovative and user-friendly design ensures your gates will be not only effective, but easy to use—increasing not only mezzanine safety, but overall employee safety compliance, as well.

Let our Business help make your Business a safer place for everyone.