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Commercial roof work requires diligent fall protection efforts, and only the most innovative and dependable guardrail systems can help protect your staff from the unexpected. During large roof installations, workers must deliver large volumes of shingles, metal, or concrete materials while handling bulky equipment and navigating ladders and hatches in unfamiliar environments.
Even after installation, the roof must remain safe for technicians to perform ongoing maintenance. While rooftop activity may not occur often, the activity can be immense when it does. How can safety managers and company owners fulfill the most common rooftop safety needs in the fastest, most reliable way?
To help answer these questions, we have outlined how you can choose the best fall protection measures for your needs by considering uncommon solutions, adapting to your team’s needs, maintain safety standards at varying heights and more.
The structure of commercial roofs varies dramatically, forcing companies to look beyond one-size-fits-all solutions for meeting regulatory standards. Still, they notice a large portion of their fall protection requirements comes down to the same type of equipment: guardrails.
Because each roof is unique, though, it's hard to cover every fall protection scenario only with basic guardrail systems. They're often made for permanent installations, which locks future workflows into place. You may find you need a more versatile system that adapts to a range of needs.
The search for more specialized rooftop guardrail systems is often driven by a combination of structural and workflow challenges. It usually begins with unexpected physical obstacles that won't accommodate traditional guardrails, including:
Inadequate mounting locations on the walking surface
Materials like HVAC conduits extending over a leading edge
Realizing accessible rooftop equipment is a designated fall hazard
RF devices that receive interference from nearby metal
All these unique situations can complicate an otherwise straightforward process. Fortunately, the best solutions to these challenges may also work well for common workflow obstacles related sub-par guardrails:
Changing workflow needs
A need to use heavy equipment perpendicular to leading edges, when the safety equipment is permanently positioned for parallel work
Temporary work that nevertheless requires fully compliant fall protection
Slow and involved installation procedure
Shifting workflows generally require workers to move guardrails at will. Even routine maintenance can suffer from an inability to properly access equipment surrounded by railings, and it's hard to convert a small section of permanent railing into a gate as accessibility needs change.
With more innovative designs, modern guardrails resolve many of these barriers to both the rooftop's structure and the needs of the job.
Due to their exceptional lasting power and structural protection, an increasing number of commercial rooftops are now using metal roofs. It's created a growing need for metal roof fall protection equipment that preserves the structure below.
Standard guardrails are largely only made to penetrate into the roof, which presents installation problems on flat metal roofs (as well as TPO and other single-ply materials). Leading guardrail manufacturers have responded by developing universal, non-penetrating guardrail mounting devices.
Without cutting into the roofing structure, a non-penetrating mount firmly secures the railings to provide metal roof fall protection with a combination of:
Wide, heavily weighted bases
Counterweights
Angled cantilever design
In addition to meeting compliance needs for metal roof fall protection, non-penetrating guardrails provide the following additional benefits for any roof:
Protecting the roof structure
Preventing roof leaks
Maintaining the roofing material's factory warranty
As with any fall protection device, you must be careful in your product and brand selections. Always reference your local OSHA or CCOHS regulations, and be sure your equipment meets or exceeds all compliance standards.
It was once extremely difficult to find suitable fall protection on walking/working surfaces without suitable mounting points on the walking surface itself. This only encouraged dedicated fall protection specialists to discovered new, reliable ways to mount railings laterally along the outer edge.
With modular guardrail systems, it's now possible to mount over the side of a ledge, preserving valuable working space. They're also suitable as custom guardrail solutions for high-profile equipment, showing yet again the power of leading fall protection manufacturers to go beyond the need to troubleshoot a single issue, and arrive at a game-changing new technology in the process.
Accommodating telecommunications equipment requires limiting the amount of metal nearby, which can interfere with RF signals. This once presented significant obstacles for fall protection compliance, but which industrial fiberglass guardrails overcome.
As a fully compliant alternative to metal railing, industrial fiberglass guardrails keep radio equipment clear without detracting from worker safety. Moreover, industrial fiberglass guardrails are specially designed with flame retardant materials. With extremely high-voltage equipment, overheating is a concern in the telecommunications industry. Of course, these innovative breakthroughs help safety managers meet fall protection and fire codes in any scenario.
Since a large majority of OSHA's fall protection requirements apply to heights as low as four feet, many of the guardrail considerations for rooftops translate directly to any working-at-height needs.
That includes shipping and warehousing facilities, where loading dock railings are a prime focal point for compliance regulators. Though the physical heights involved may be far less than rooftops, they still present potential fall hazards. Facility owners are thus largely held to the same guardrail standards as for rooftops, who must exercise the same caution in selecting effective, easy-to-use loading dock railings.
Most guardrail systems manufacturers build their products for narrow purposes, forcing safety managers to juggle multiple vendor relationships. At BlueWater, we design fall protection barriers for the widest range of fall safety needs for rooftops and other workplace environments, including loading dock railings, flatbed trailer guardrails, and much more.
Part of the Tractel® family of companies, we've been a leader in worker safety in the most challenging environments for over 40 years. We're proud to protect our customers from the widest possible range of fall hazards with American ingenuity and manufacturing.
If you have any questions about our modular rooftop railings or our non-penetrating industrial fiberglass guardrails, contact us using the form in the top right corner. Our experienced service technicians can help you find exactly the right guardrail system for your facility or job site so you can maintain full compliance under even the most varied scenarios.
