To paraphrase the great Stevie Ray Vaughan, a lot of people and places right now can’t stand the weather.

If your neck of the woods has been anything like us here in Southeast Michigan, you’ve probably been dealing with an awful lot of rainfall lately – and if there’s a lot of rain in most areas, there tends to be a lot of flooding.

Floods are never welcome, but they can cause particularly big headaches in warehousing due to the risks they can pose to both your inventory, and the safety of your workers.

Luckily, there’s a few easy things you can do to help mitigate the risk of floods affecting your Warehouse, both for the sake of your workers, your goods, and your entire facility.

Reducing the Risks of Floods in Your Warehouse

Using waterproof shelving

Floods in a warehouse can take a lot of forms, from several feet of running water to small puddles or leaks coming in through a crack or a floor. Even if you’re facing a small amount of water that isn’t posing a risk to your inventory, you always run the risk of seeing your warehouse Shelving fall victim to water damage.

In cases like this, waterproof shelving is a worthwhile investment for any part of your warehouse that’s more prone to leaks or flooding. Shelving like MetroMax shelves or other epoxy-coated shelves can help lessen the risk of rust or mildew growing on your shelving, helping to prevent damage to either the shelves or the goods they store.

Keep an eye on your electrical system

One of the most at-risk parts of any warehouse when water enters the picture is the electrical system. Your warehouse likely uses a ton of electrical equipment, from RFID scanners to electrical motor forklifts, and all of it needs to be powered by the various outlets throughout your warehouse. As able, make sure any of your outlets, fuse boxes, and the like are raised above ground level, and if there’s any that are too close to the ground, try to disconnect them or discontinue their use during any times of flood risk to make sure nothing gets damaged, and nobody gets injured.

Raise the rest of your shelving

Speaking of raising things from ground level, the rest of your shelving could probably stand to be raised up as well. Things like industrial metal shelving and pallet racks need to be raised up by using pallet rack uprights and shelving posts to make sure they stand far enough off the floor. If you can’t raise them from the floor, make sure to leave the bottom shelf empty to reduce the risk of inventory damage if the worst happens.

Safer record storage

Finally, a lot of warehouses and other industrial facilities tend to need to retain physical, paper records for compliance and customer privacy reasons. These records are always at risk of being damaged during a flood, as they’re often simple paper documents stored inside cardboard boxes.

Accordingly, make sure all of your documents are stored on high density shelving that can be moved or raised as needed. Keep your records as high up as possible, and leave the bottom shelves empty to prevent anything shelved too low from getting damaged. This could also be a good opportunity to sort through your documents, and get rid of anything that you might not need any longer – documents of a certain age, or documents from clients that are no longer using your services – to help free up space.

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