Gaco Asbestos Roof Waterproofing in County Antrim — Encapsulation Without Removal

County Antrim no longer exists as a council. Its farms and towns are split between Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough Council, Mid and East Antrim, Causeway Coast and Glens, and part of Lisburn and Castlereagh, so the first step on any roof project is to confirm which authority covers the address. Antrim and Newtownabbey alone had 145,700 residents in Census 2021. The county’s main towns include Antrim, Ballymena, Larne, Carrickfergus and Randalstown, and between them lies some of the most heavily stocked farmland in Northern Ireland.

DAERA’s June 2025 census recorded 4,567 farms with a County Antrim correspondence address, averaging 38 hectares and covering 218,023 hectares, the second-largest county total after Tyrone. The livestock figures are large: 332,198 cattle, including 73,226 dairy cows and 43,176 beef cows, 537,415 sheep and 47,255 pigs. Poultry stands out most, at 6,888,886 birds, the biggest county flock in Northern Ireland. Every one of those enterprises needs roofed space for animals, feed, bedding and machinery, and where any of those buildings still carry asbestos cement roofs, the sheets have been weathering for a long time.

The weather does the slow damage. The Met Office’s Aldergrove station recorded a 1991 to 2020 average of about 872 mm of rain on roughly 161 wet days. Rain that often keeps a roof damp for long periods. On asbestos cement it gradually opens up the surface, feeds moss and lichen, and loosens the seal around fixings, until water gets through at laps and ridges. A drip over a poultry house, a milking parlour or a bedding store causes trouble out of all proportion to the size of the crack.

Encapsulation treats the whole roof rather than one leak. The approved installer surveys the sheets and the purlins beneath, replaces any sheets that are broken, and removes growth by a method that does not grind or abrade the cement. Gaco urethane coatings, a U91 base coat and U92 top coat, then seal the surface, and a GacoFlex silicone topcoat can be added where full waterproofing is specified. Because the sheets stay put, housed birds or cattle do not have to be moved out for a strip-and-replace job, although the installer’s risk assessment may still ask for some areas to be cleared while particular sections are worked on.

In County Antrim, as across Northern Ireland, the Control of Asbestos Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2012 govern this work and HSENI enforces them. Access is planned around the fragility of the sheets, using crawling boards, staging and edge protection. Where the project also involves new insulation, the Building Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2012 and Technical Booklet F2 apply and the relevant council’s building control service needs to be involved. Duratite supplies the Gaco coatings and passes County Antrim enquiries to an approved installer; the island-of-Ireland reference project is asbestos cement roof encapsulation at SAICA Warrenpoint, Co. Down.