Abstract: At approximately 6:10 p.m. on January 26, 2001, Employee #1 was working in the tropical receiving area of the warehouse. He was unloading a pallet of avocados from a truck trailer using a banana fork lift. Initially, there was not enough clearance between the bottom of the fully opened dock door and the top of a folk lift cage because the door came down a few inches after it was fully opened. Employee #1 used his left hand to raise the dock door to get clearance for the forklift to enter the trailer. Upon lowering his hand, he noticed that his left thumb muscle had been scraped off. Employee #1 sustained an amputation to his left thumb. He was transported to Martin Luther King Hospital and was transferred to USC Medical Center for vascular surgery. It was determined that the cause of the accident was that Employee #1 exposed his left hand to the shear point of the top of the forklift cage and the opening between the dock door and the wall.