Holy ****, yeah, no kidding. That simple protective device means he kind of just goes about his business vs. possibly being severely injured or killed.
I have a friend who works for planning and development. He wears a suit and wingtips not jeans and and boots. But on a job site, he always dons a hard hat. In his office he has an old, steel version of the hard hat with a huge dent in it and a bolt sitting next to it. That bolt fell from high above and the hard hat allowed him to be able to drive home from work rather than be carried away by an ambulance.
This guy in the video would surely have been severely injured if he had not been wearing the hard hat.
There was someone just recently that died from being struck in the head from a tape measure dropped from about 50 floors up. He was delivering sheet rock and stopped to talk to someone in a truck. The tape measure was knocked off a belt, fell 50 stories, bounced off a constuction equipment and struck him in the head. His hat was in his truck, not on his head.
I have worked in the Balkans quite a bit and must admit that I laughed when I read this response.
Re the Minister, he was fortunate that he was wearing a hard hat; when keeping an eye out for ground that is slippery underfoot, it is very easy to overlook the fact that greater danger may come from chunks of ice falling on you from above.
In fact, for precisely this very reason, each year sees a few fatalities during the period of the thaw, in late winter, when melting icicles crash from gable ends or roofs, onto people walking below. This is why one sometimes res municipal authorities hacking away at icicles, with access to the area below temporarily blocked off, come late February or March.