Falls account for accidental deaths equally between the work and home environment. This article will focus on clarifying what represents a slip, trip, or fall and the role countermeasures play in dealing with them. Future articles will specifically address each issue and provide additional countermeasures as they address each issue. Slips represent the loss of balance caused by too little friction between a human's feet and her or his walking surface. Both slips and trips often end in falls.
Falls result when body movement shifts the body too far off the center of balance.
The problem with a given fall is that there is seldom any countermeasures in place to absorb the energy that is to be exchanged between the person falling and the objects he or she is falling on. If no countermeasures are in place to absorb the energy exchange, both the human and the objects they are falling on must experience loss. The degree to which each experiences loss will be based on how the energy will be exchanged. A simple rule of thumb is that, if the energy exchange is over a lot of time and space, the loss will be small. It follows that if the energy is spread over a short time and space, the loss will be great.