Most of us do not spend much time thinking about forklifts.
They are there, somewhere in the background — orange, yellow, beeping, lifting pallets in warehouses, hardware stores, loading docks, shipping centers, factories, lumberyards, big-box retailers, and distribution hubs. They appear briefly in our peripheral vision and then vanish again into the machinery of modern life.
But forklifts are one of the quiet backbones of the global economy.
Before almost anything reaches a store shelf, job site, warehouse rack, delivery truck, or front porch, it has likely been moved by a forklift. Not once, either. Many times. The goods we buy, unwrap, cook with, build with, wear, gift, return, and complain about when they arrive one day late have usually passed through a long chain of people and machines — and forklifts are everywhere in that chain.
Behind those machines are human beings. (At least for now; though, the robots are coming.)
Warehouse workers. Dock workers. Trucking crews. Mechanics. Safety trainers. Engineers. Battery designers. Logistics specialists. People whose labor keeps the whole system moving, often invisibly.
Wherever people are working with heavy mobile machines — lifting, backing up, turning, stacking, loading, unloading, and moving thousands of pounds at a time — accidents happen.
Not little accidents. Not “rub some dirt on it” accidents.
Forklift accidents are typically catastrophic. They crush, paralyze, maim, and kill. They can happen in seconds: a tip-over, a collision, a fall from height, a pinned worker, a dropped load, a blind corner, a rushed maneuver, a missed signal, a machine that suddenly does exactly what physics says it will do.
National Forklift Safety Day exists because these risks are real, and because the people who take them are often doing so on behalf of the rest of us. They help make it possible for something manufactured across an ocean to appear in a store, warehouse, or delivery van with almost absurd speed. We benefit from that system constantly. Most of the time, we do not see the danger baked into it.
This map shows forklift-related fatalities, injuries, paralysis cases, and accidents involving forklifts and similar machinery across the United States. It is not meant as a curiosity or a punchline. It is meant as a small act of recognition.
Every point on the map represents a real event. Behind each event is a person, a family, a workplace, and a chain of decisions and conditions that led to harm.
This map is dedicated to everyone who has been injured by forklift accidents, and to everyone who has lost someone because of them. It is also dedicated to the workers who continue to operate, maintain, design, and work around these machines every day.
View Map HereWebMapGPT Prompt #1
Attached are two datasets. One is of forklift fatalities. The other forklift accidents.
I would like to make a somber, reflective, and serious map representing those injured by forklifts.
Please look at the datasets and come up with three different ideas and ways to represent the data respectfully and somberly using cartographic techniques.
Some off-the-cuff ideas I have include:
– a time-lapse animation of fatalities and injuries by location on a map of the use, with a tab counting them up, as was done in the map here:
– a clustered point map, with each dot being a fatality or injury, but the ability to show only fatalities, only injuries, or both together via filter/toggle
– a map with fatalities with a histogram showing “companies” with fatalities by count on the bottom, which when the histogram is clicked shows only that companies’ fatalities
Design Issues to consider: some locations will have many points, perhaps.
The two datasets are geocoded differently. The injury one has lat/long coordinates and is CSV. The fatalities one is a geopackage (I believe) and is geocoded by street address.
WebMapperGPT Prompt #2
Let’s go with number one, please. Can you also use an albers equal area projection with hawaii and alaska in the lower left of the window. For the Legend pane, which should be max-/min-imizable, please don’t use the word Legend or Key, instead something like “Victims” etc.
Thank you! I love the first idea.
View Map Here
View the map here
View map here
