Rack inspection
Find the damagebefore it finds you
An annual inspection of your racking, carried out to CSA A344 and supervised by an engineer. You get what is wrong, how urgent each item is, and what to do first.
What the standard asks for
Two inspections. Only one of them is ours.
CSA A344 splits rack inspection in two, and the split is the useful part: one is a habit your team keeps, the other is an engineering exercise.
- Routine — monthly, by your people
- A walk of the aisles looking for what is visible from the floor: fresh impact, a missing safety pin, a pallet sitting badly, a brace that has been hit. It belongs to the people who are there every day, and the standard puts it at roughly monthly.
- Specialist — annually, by us
- A full structural examination against the standard, normally carried out under the supervision of an engineer, who is responsible for the inspection process and for how damage is reported. That is the service on this page.
- The interval comes from a risk assessment
- Monthly and annually are the general case. The real frequency comes from your environment — how often racks get hit, how many shifts you run, what the trucks are, how big the site is, how well the operators are trained, and what the local authority requires.
The inspection
What we look at
The list is long on purpose. Racking fails at one component, and it is rarely the one anybody was watching.
The structure
- Anything that no longer matches the layout and elevation drawings
- Corroded or damaged columns
- Damaged or missing frame diagonals and horizontals
- Sheared or missing floor anchors
- Damaged or permanently deflected beams
- Beam connectors that are not fully engaged
- Missing safety pins, or the wrong ones
- Missing or misaligned row spacers
- Safety bars displaced, damaged, or free to move sideways
- Columns out of plumb
- Base plates and shims
How the racking is being used
- Loads that overhang, spread or bulge
- Damaged pallets, and pallets the wrong size for the bay
- Loads heavier than the bay is rated for
- Pallets off-centre, or landed on one beam instead of two
- Pallets stacked on top of each other in the bay
- Housekeeping — film, banding and debris in the flue and the aisle
- Clearances lost, including the space under a sprinkler head
The inspection works low: the bottom of an upright is where lift trucks do their work. Some of it needs clearing — a section has to come off load before a permanent deformation can be measured properly, and deep racking, drive-in and drive-thru, cannot be judged without partly emptying the tunnels. We identify both from your layout beforehand, so it is scheduled rather than discovered on the day.
Findings
Graded, not listed
An undifferentiated list of problems is not a report, it is homework. Every finding goes into one of three categories, and a fourth records how the racking is being used.
- Red
Immediate danger. Out of service now. The bay is unloaded and isolated, and nothing goes back into it until it has been repaired and re-approved.
- Amber
Restoration required. May stay in service. Corrective action is required, and the deadline is set on the day rather than left open.
- Green
Minor defect. Recorded and monitored. Re-checked at the next inspection, and watched for the pattern that says something upstream needs changing.
The fourth category is not damage at all. It records poor operating practice — badly placed pallets, broken pallets, loads resting on the safety bars — the practices that put damage into the structure, and the cheapest thing on the report to fix.
Why an engineer sets the limits
There is a temptation to publish a table of thresholds and let anyone with a straight edge grade their own racking. CSA A344 stops just short of it. The standard sets out how a deformation is measured, and then leaves the limits themselves to the engineer supervising the inspection — its own damage-report form is printed with the threshold cells blank. A fixed number takes no account of how much redundancy the structure has, where the damage sits on the member, where that member sits in the run, how it would actually fail, or the shape of the deformation. The same dent means two different things in two different bays, and a table cannot tell them apart.
What you receive
A report you can act on, and hand over
- Every finding, photographed and located
- Recorded by aisle and bay, so whoever does the repair can find it without a second walk of the building.
- A severity grade and a deadline
- Each item carries its category and the time allowed to act, assigned during the inspection rather than negotiated afterwards.
- A prioritised action list
- What to do first, what can wait, and what is only worth watching — in that order, on one page.
- Sealed by an OIQ-member engineer
- Reports are sealed by an engineer at Optim-Structure, our sister engineering firm. In Québec, assessing rack damage, calculating a capacity reduction and designing a repair are reserved engineering acts — this is a legal requirement, not a service level.
- Filed in the OTS Portal, per site
- Your reports live in one place, by site and by year, with the current one flagged. Multi-site operators see every building in one list.
The OTS Portal
The report does not live in an inbox
Every inspection is filed by site and by year, with the current one flagged. When an auditor, an insurer or a new operations manager asks for the latest report, it is one screen rather than an email search.
Certificates & reports
Distribution centre — Boucherville
- Current
Annual inspection — 2026
Sealed 14 March 2026
- Archived
Annual inspection — 2025
Sealed 9 March 2025
- Archived
Capacity report — aisles 1 to 6
Sealed 22 May 2025
Filed per site. The flagged one is the one an auditor asks for.
After the inspection
What happens to what we find
Red items first
Anything in immediate danger is isolated on the day and quoted straight away. Nothing waits for the report to be typed up.
Repair or replace
A damaged component is replaced, or repaired by a method an engineer has approved. Either way the outcome is engineered, and it is the repaired structure that is certified rather than the part.
Re-rate if the configuration has moved
If beams have been moved, a level added, or a run relocated since it was built, the capacity no longer follows from the original drawings and the racking needs a new calculation.
Next year has a baseline
Findings carry forward, so the second inspection shows what is new, what was fixed, and where damage keeps coming back to the same bay.
FAQ
Questions we get
Not in those words, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something. CSA A344 is a consensus standard, not a regulation, and it says so itself. What is binding is broader: an employer must take the measures necessary to protect workers' health, safety and physical integrity, and in Québec the engineering work involved — assessing damage, calculating a capacity reduction, designing a repair — is reserved to a member of the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec. An annual inspection to CSA A344 is how a facility demonstrates it has met the first duty and respected the second.
Rarely all of it. Racking is graded against what it carries when full, so most of the walk happens around a building that keeps running. Two things need clearing: sections where a permanent deformation has to be measured off load, and deep racking, because a drive-in or drive-thru tunnel cannot be assessed from outside. We identify both from your layout beforehand, so it is scheduled rather than discovered.
Your team should be doing the monthly routine inspection, and nobody is better placed to — they see the racking every day and they notice what changed. The annual specialist inspection is a different job: it is a structural examination normally carried out under the supervision of an engineer, who owns the inspection process and the way damage is classified and reported.
The bay comes out of service before we leave. It is unloaded, marked and isolated so it cannot be reloaded by mistake, and it stays that way until it has been repaired and re-approved. Red is not a strong recommendation; it is the point at which the racking is no longer to be used.
Not as a table you could grade against yourself. CSA A344 sets out how a deformation is measured and then leaves the limits to the engineer supervising the inspection — its own damage-report form ships with the threshold cells blank. A fixed measurement ignores redundancy, the position of the damage on the member, the position of that member in the run, and the way it would fail. A public table would invite people to grade their own racking with a ruler and reach the wrong answer confidently.
With a capacity report rather than an inspection. Racking that does not carry an engineer's seal has to be examined to establish that its design met the standards in force when it was built and that seismic forces were accounted for. Once you know what it is rated to carry, an annual inspection has something to measure against.
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