How to Clean a Paint Spill

The words “I need a spill-kit to aisle such-and-such immediately!” yelling in over the walkie-talkie never fails to send chills up my spine. Whenever I hear those words, I picture that a bomb of paint exploded in the aisle and left everything and everyone in the aisle white as flour. As I am walking the wheeled spill cage toward aisle 75, I can see a crowd starting to gather. The closer I get, the stronger the fresh paint smell gets. I can start to see white specks of paint outside of the aisle and in the aisle next to 75, so I know that it’s bad. Now I can hear a couple of guys laughing at another, who is covered in paint from head to toe and yelling expletives. “Gotdammit, I didn’t see that the plastic was torn on the back of the fucking pallet. When I lifted the pallet and backed into the aisle, the whole back of the damn pallet slid off.
Cleaning up a spill of this magnitude can be quite a daunting task. In fact, when you see 30-40 gallons of paint fallen from 20 feet in the air to your warehouse floor, the clean-up job in front of you looks impossible. As team leader, you need to delegate responsibilities so that no efficiency is lost. You need to have everyone around to start picking up and standing up the spilling containers, so that you stop the paint from spilling. You need one guy to grab a couple of empty pallets, and another to grab a couple of sheets of plastic so that you can lay the plastic on the pallets, and place the damaged product on top of them. What you might see if you forget to lay the plastic down is paint leaking in between the boards of the pallet. This will create more puddles to clean, and trail paint to your damage area. Before trying to clear up any of your puddles, you need to make sure that you eliminate any overhead hazards. If there are loose paint cans that have fallen into your overhead racks, they pose a great safety threat as they can wedge loose and fall onto the clean-up crew below. Have two of your team members put