A near miss is an unplanned event in which a forklift, load or person came close to causing an injury or damage, but no one was hurt and nothing was damaged.
OSHA treats near misses, also called close calls, as incidents worth reporting and investigating, because the root causes behind a near miss can produce an injury the next time. Typical forklift near misses are a pedestrian stepping out at a rack end as a truck passes, a load shifting on raised forks, or a truck reversing toward a worker the operator did not see.
Many near misses go unreported when reporting depends on the people involved, because nothing visible happened and some workers fear blame. Proximity and pedestrian detection systems can log close-approach events automatically, which gives a larger and less biased sample, although a logged alert is not always a true near miss and needs review. A near miss is also not the same as a PSIF event: only some near misses carried the potential for serious injury. The near-miss reporting guide covers how to set up a blame-free reporting process.