Walsh & Associates, Inc.

An employee was unwrapping a pallet of four drums to prepare an outbound shipment. The four drums were secured together and to the pallet with stretch wrap. After cutting away the wrap with a utility knife, the employee pulled on the wrap to free it from the pallet and drums. He had also staged his forklift next to the drum pallet. The forklift utilizes an implement known as a "drum picker," which would be used to lift individual drums from the full pallet to fill the outbound load/order. While he was manually pulling the cut stretch wrap from the drums/pallet, he lost his grip on the stretch wrap and fell backward into the drum picker implement, striking his upper torso/back. He was hospitalized for a fractured C3 vertebra.