ABSTRACT
Prevent products from tipping over or falling on someone by adding stabilizing features or securing them to their surroundings. Between 2000 and 2013, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission reported that product tip-overs and/or instability led to 430 deaths. They also reported that tip-overs caused an average of 38,000 injuries requiring emergency department visits per year during the period of 2011 to 2013. An object is naturally stable when its center of gravity is within its footprint rather than outside of it. Move the center of gravity beyond the footprint and the result is instability plus the potential to tip over. To prevent tip-overs and handle heavy loads, lift trucks and cranes have outriggers that extend to increase their footprints so that they remain under the entire apparatus’s center of gravity. Outriggers of a sort are used to stabilize the top of some roofing ladders.
