Abstract: On December 23, 2019, an employee was working as a laborer for a wholesale grocery supply firm. He was working at a shipping and receiving warehouse operated by the firm. He was working as a pallet sorter. He was working on the salvage dock at the warehouse. At the salvage dock in the warehouse, employees received bales of cardboard, unloaded them from trucks, and reloaded them onto other trucks. Occasionally, bales were temporarily stored on the dock due to logistics. This practice had existed for years,l but there were typically not too many bales on the dock and plenty of space. There was a designated area, a standardized practice, and a method for stacking bales. The day of the incident fell on a holiday weekend. There were many more bales than normal. The bales were stacked four high. This was a normal height, but because one or more bales were damaged or wet, the base of the stack was not stable. Each bale was about 2.5 feet (0.76 meters) tall. The total height of the stack was about 9.5 to 10 feet (2.9 to 3.1 meters). Each bale weighed about 300 pounds (140 kg). A stack was about 3.5 feet (1.1 meters) wid. The height to width ratio alone made the stacks unstable without pallets. Add in the issue of damaged bales at the bottom, and this method of stacking was unsecure. In this incident, the employee was operating a pallet jack. As he was moving pallets near a stack, the top one or two bales fell off and struck him in his back and in the back of his head. He was taken by ambulance to a hospital and admitted with back and head injuries. He was hospitalized for two or more days. The firm's management team was aware of the hazard. All the managers typically walked through this area and had seen the process. The shift supervisor also knew about the stacking process and the method of stacking bales. The employee was not reprimanded.