Despite its valuable fire-retardant properties, asbestos and its fibres are now known to cause serious and ongoing health issues. While asbestos has been all but gone from construction in the last forty years or so, occasionally there are existing roof structures with asbestos that you’ll have to work with.

Adding a walkway or stairs can be a great way of maximising the life of an existing roof, but working with asbestos is unenviable and frankly best avoided. It’s inherently brittle, so there’s no chance of either walking on a roof with it or using the roof itself for any form of support without it giving way, potentially causing major health and clean-up issues.

There’s also the limitation of installing a highquality aluminium structure onto a building with older timber battens, which are the likely structural backbone of buildings with an asbestos roof. These may not be up to par when it comes to handling the additional weight of walkways and equipment.

While asbestos
has been all
but gone from
construction in
the last forty years
or so, occasionally
there are existing
roof structures
that you’ll have
to work with.

If the building is sound, you’re best to bring in asbestos specialists who can take on the responsibility of drilling holes so that your structure can be installed. Allow a doublesided handrail the entire walkway over the roof to reduce the chance of someone attempting to treat the roof as trafficable, and you’ll be good as gold.

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