Your rooftop is crowded. As far as your rooftop is concerned, your workforce may need to navigate next to steep drop-offs, over ledges, around cable runs, and past skylights. Putting a foot in the wrong place can have negative consequences, if you’re not careful.
As a commercial building owner or manager, it is your responsibility to provide a safe rooftop access system, safety equipment, and safety training for your maintenance workers, contractors, and building personnel. Here’s what you need to know.
They say that “every safety rule is written in blood,” and the safety statistics for rooftop accidents bear this statement out. In the entire industry of building construction and maintenance, rooftops are one of the largest sources of accident, injury, and lawsuits.
In short, roofs are very dangerous, and safety boards such as OSHA take a dim view of building owners who fail to provide rooftop protections. As such, it’s important to adhere to best practices for rooftop safety.
Your first major concern is documentation. You may not be able to immediately safeguard every problem area on your roof, but you do have the power to communicate areas that rooftop workers should avoid. Although telling a worker not to work too close to the roof edge – or to avoid unprotected skylights – may seem self-explanatory, it’s a valuable foundation on which to build more permanent safety fixtures. Importantly, you need to give your workers notice of these problems in writing, and then keep a memorandum that you have done so.
Simultaneously, you need to take OSHA regulations into account. If your workers are exposed to drops, OSHA requires buildings to implement a combination of measures that guarantee worker safety. Each of the following can be used either on their own or in conjunction with other methods.
Warning line systems and monitors can help keep workers away from the roof edge, but they can’t actually keep people from falling. Meanwhile, PFAS is the ultimate in fall protection, but it may be expensive and impractical for smaller maintenance tasks. Guardrails represent a happy medium, and they can make a rooftop very safe when used in conjunction with other rooftop equipment.
Guardrails provide a great deal of safety near the roof edge, but they’re only a piece of the puzzle. They need to be installed correctly, and they need to be used with other equipment in order to create a totally safe system.
Used together, these systems create a rooftop that is safe and accessible, minimizing danger to workers while helping to preserve your investment in your commercial roof.