Ben Franklin penned, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” And in cases where someone is working at a height, prevention goes well beyond personal fall protection equipment. Where fall protection equipment prevents the person from falling, a dropped object prevention plan protects people on the ground from items that can fall off of equipment or a worker.
While the risk of dropping an object may seem insignificant or a prevention plan superficial, consider that your conscious mind is similar to a binary computer (think “ones and zeros”); able to process only one thought at a time. When performing a given task, your brain is busy sorting information relevant to that task, say, stocking inventory 30 feet above the surface. It is not actively processing anything other than the task at hand.