1. A key to safety around fork trucks is for pedestrians to make eye contact with fork truck drivers.  The driver does not want to hit you.  If you make eye contact with him or her, the driver will know you are there and will give you a wide birth.  When I enter an area with moving fork trucks, the first thing I do is to look at each fork truck near me, and make eye contact with the driver.   To confirm that eye contact was established, we each smile and nod at each other.   Often I will also give the driver a slight wave of my hand.  Since developing this “eye contact” technique, I have spent thousands of hours in warehouses and have never had another accident (or even a near miss) with a fork truck.
2. Install back-up alarms on all fork trucks.  The only exception to this rule is if you have many fork trucks operating in a small area.   The only case in my career where I felt that back up alarms were not justified was at a busy loading dock my company operated.  We had over 20 fork trucks operating in this relatively small area and back up alarms would not have been a good idea because at any one time there would be numerous alarms sounding.
3. Rear view mirrors are also an excellent method of preventing fork truck backing accidents.  I am shocked by the number of fork trucks I see in industry that have no rear view mirrors at all.  The best rear view mirror set up I’ve seen was at a paper mill.   At this paper mill, all of their fork trucks were equipped with two 6-inch convex mirrors on the right and the left sides of the operator (see photo below); and a large rectangular panoramic mirror in the center.  These three mirrors provided an excellent angle of view and relatively complete coverage of the rear of the fork truck.

Some employers have told me that they don’t need to implement the above three controls because their fork truck drivers “always look in the direction they are traveling”.   Wrong, this is not the truth!  I have never known a fork truck driver who constantly looked to the rear while backing – especially if the driving distance was short.   In the real world, operators will glance back, verify their path is clear, turn their head back to the front, and then proceed to back up.