Worker standing beneath escapes being crushed by falling car

General Discussion
1

What failed?

(Mute is your friend.)

2

The automatic arm restraints were either disabled, broken or removed that is why the lift arms all moved, once the lift arms come off the ground at a set point, they automatically lock in place, and stay that way until the vehicle is lowered back down to the floor and the automatic safety arm restraints releaseā€¦

image

Car Lift Safety.

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3

It appears to me that the car was too far forward.

4

Bad angle, it appears to drop first at the driverā€™s front corner and we canā€™t see the lift arm on that side until the car is already on the groundā€¦

5

Anybody that has ever set the rack on a high ground clearance and or lifted vehicle understands how the swing arms work and there safety locks, when you have to make adjustments to the angle of the arm(s)ā€¦ with out all the modern adaptersā€¦

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6

I think Allah allowed the front left swing arm to slip out from under the vehicle. As someone already said, the locks were not used.

7

How common are such ā€œaccidents?ā€ Somehow I was lucky enough to avoid such a problem for several decades.

8

I dunno how common they are but years ago a good family friend was hit when the car came off the rack. He was a great guy, good ball player, and good mechanic. When he got out of the hospital his motor skills were shot and he was never the same. Worked the ford parts counter for a while but his final years were spent delivering papers.

9

On the radio program Ray described a car falling off his shopā€™s lift . He was working on it at the time, only the car was injured. I had a teenage job filling gas at a gas station. Low pay, but one of the benefits was that I could use their lift to work on my own car. It was the conventional single post lift. While my car always stayed put, I thought it didnā€™t look as securely attached to the lift as Iā€™d have liked. It looked like it could slide off pretty easily. My idea at the time was that the car & lift manufacturers should coordinate their designs, so that a lifted car was pretty much locked to the lift.

The closest Iā€™ve come to danger from a car falling on me as a diyā€™er is when a 2x4 block placed between the car and the floor jack split and the car moved down about an inch, to my surprise.
Fortunately, no damage.