Dropped Objects

A one-pound wrench falling thirty feet arrives at about thirty miles an hour and hits with a force in the hundreds of pounds, concentrated on a point. Hard hats are tested for a fraction of that. A dropped tape measure has killed a worker who was wearing his.

The rules

1926.501(c) requires protection from falling objects wherever people work below. 1926.502(j) says how:

• Toeboards at least 3½ inches high, no more than a quarter inch off the surface, able to take a 50-pound force in any downward or outward direction.
• Where material is stacked higher than the toeboard, you need paneling or screening from the surface up to the top of the guardrail.
• Or canopies, or barricading the area below and keeping everyone out of it.

Zones, not luck

• Barricade below overhead work, and make the barricade mean something. A cone with nobody enforcing it is decoration.
• Nobody works directly below anyone else unless there is hard protection between them.
• Give the zone a margin. Objects bounce, roll and get deflected by scaffold, so the danger area is wider than the drop line.
• Tell the crews below before you start, not while things are coming down.

Keeping it up there

This is where the real gains are, because a barricade is a last line.

• Tether the tools. Anything you carry above ground level gets a lanyard to a wrist or a harness D-ring — drills, wrenches, tape measures, radios. Rated tool tethers, not string.
• Closed containers and buckets for fasteners and small parts, never loose in a pocket.
• Hoist and lower with a line. Never throw anything down and never drop it "clear."
• Nothing loose on a rail, a beam, a scaffold plank or a ledge. No coffee cups, no phones, no offcuts. Put it down inside something.
• Sweep the deck before you move, and again before you leave.

Below

• Hard hat and chin strap, and look up when you enter an area where work is going on above.
• Do not take the shortcut under the scaffold. That is the whole reason the long way exists.
• Report anything that fell, even if it hit nothing. That one was luck, and luck does not repeat on schedule.