Gaco Asbestos Roof Waterproofing in County Louth — Encapsulation Without Removal

Louth is Ireland’s smallest county by area, a compact run of lowland on the east coast whose old boundaries touched Meath, Monaghan and Armagh. Census 2022 counted 139,703 people here. Drogheda and Dundalk hold a large share of them, but the ground between those towns and out around Ardee and Carlingford is farmed hard. Teagasc’s county soil fertility survey describes Louth farming as fairly evenly split between tillage, drystock and dairy. Each of those leaves its own buildings behind: grain and machinery stores on tillage holdings, cattle and sheep housing on drystock farms, and parlours, cubicle houses and calf sheds on dairy units.

A great many of those yards were roofed when corrugated asbestos cement was simply the normal sheet for a farm building. The sheets are mostly still up, but the surface has aged. By Irish standards Louth is dry. Met Éireann’s Dublin Airport station, the closest long-term record, averaged 772.5 mm of rain a year over 1991 to 2020 on about 137 wet days. Even so, that is plenty to grow moss on the shaded pitch, rust the old hook bolts and open hairline cracks at the laps. On a tillage farm the first warning is often a damp corner of stored grain; in a calf shed it is a drip landing on the straw.

Encapsulation fixes the roof without taking it down. Gaco urethane coatings, with U91 and U92 being the grades used on asbestos cement, are applied over the existing sheets to seal them under one continuous waterproof film. Nothing is stripped, bagged or hauled to a licensed facility, and the shed keeps its roof the whole time. The approved installer walks the job from the ground and from safe access first, marks sheets that are too broken to seal, replaces them, and cleans the surface without abrading the cement. Louth’s lower count of wet days tends to give more dry windows for application, though work still waits for a dry roof and conditions within Gaco’s limits. Duratite supplies the materials and the approved installer does the work.

On any Irish farm, the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (Exposure to Asbestos) Regulations 2006 (S.I. No. 386 of 2006, as amended) apply to work that could disturb asbestos cement, and the Health and Safety Authority enforces them. Fragile sheets mean the corrugations are never walked; staging and crawling boards are built into the method. Where the job also adds or changes insulation, TGD L 2022 is the guidance that applies, and Louth County Council is the building control authority. The island-of-Ireland reference project for asbestos cement roof encapsulation is SAICA Warrenpoint, Co. Down.

When you enquire about a Louth farm roof, list the buildings concerned, what each is used for at different times of year, and any sheets you know are already broken. Photos from the ground give the installer a head start before the survey.