Rank: Forum user 
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Afternoon all, Wanting a bit of advice for those with more knowledge of roof access safety.
Our operatives clean a roof with skylights and use rope lines to enable them to reach the edge of the roof, is it acceptable to use rope lines with fall arrest lanyards?
There are a large number of roof lights on the building.
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Rank: Super forum user 
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A few thoughts...
Fall arrest fundamentally permits a fall. Fall restraint length lanywards are nearly always preferable and avoids a number of the issues I'm about to raise below.
Rope lines are not the only critical bit but what the 'rope line' will pull on i.e. the anchor. Are the anchors capable of withstanding the weight of a fall? There are various organisations who can test this for you and hopefully they were installed with fall arrest in mind.
Roof lights = fragile surfaces. Fragile surfaces, when fallen through, will likely create a nice sharp edge which may foreseeably have a somewhat negative impact on the lanyard/webbing now being dragged across it under load. Lanyards and ropes are strong in tension lengthways but not so good when a knife edge is slicing across them. Preventing option of walking on fragile surfaces is thus definitely preferable - restraint!
Assuming that person falls off roof, doesn't have their lanyard severed and the anchor holds (and there is enough space to permit the webbing etc. to tear before they deck out - approx 6m) then you now need a plan to get them back up or get them down. This needs to be planned through in advance and equipment/training available whilst not forgetting that your existing 'rope line' has suffered dynamic loading and is indeed actively under load with a person hanging off it so may no longer be a suitable anchorage for the rescuer.
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Rank: Forum user
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Thanks for the reply. A bit more detail for you.
The mansafe system is a Sotor fall arrest safety line running around the roof, however this line runs very close to the fragile roof lights in some areas and hence work restraint would not be possible.
The reason for the need to use rope lines is to enable the operatives to reach the edge of the roof to clean the gutters as the safety line is more than 2m away from the edge in some places. All our harness trained operatives are also rescue trained using our equipment.
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Rank: Forum user
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Hi, We recently had work caried out on our warehouse roof. We install scaffold edge protection all the way round and installed netting under the skylights.
We had to empty all the upper racks in the warehouse to get the netting installed correctly.
The Mewp that was used to install the netting was kept on site just in case someone have to be retrieved from the netting.
I shy away from fall arrest for all the reasons mentioned above.
Andy
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Rank: Super forum user
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Ah ha. Thanks for the extra detail.
Regarding the edge of the roof, fall restraint lanyards can be adjustable - but that does require some trust in your operatives to actively adjust to suit the reach of the work being undertaken. Its not unusual to find that equipment is not always installed in the best location or other forms of anchorage could have been better - but you have to work with what you've got sometimes unless cost for improvement is reasonable.
If you are looking at fall arrest vs fragile surface in some locations then I think you need to look at additional measures. Some are mentioned in the post above but could also potentially deck out or temporarily guard those areas for duration of works?
The difficulty is that roof spaces are rarely uniform in risk profile across their entire space and so different or differing solutions may be required at several points along the access route that may then differ again from the controls needed at the actual point of work.
I would reiterate my point about the rescuer likely needing to work on the same kit that's already under load and just been in a fall incident. Worthwhile checking what the manufacturer says about that.
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 2 users thanked Xavier123 for this useful post.
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