Gaco Asbestos Roof Waterproofing in Sligo — Encapsulation Without Removal

Sligo town is the North West’s main urban centre, with 20,608 people at Census 2022 and a ring of nearby settlements including Strandhill, Rosses Point, Ballysadare and Collooney. It is also IDA Ireland’s regional base. The Finisklin Business & Technology Park, a 45-hectare IDA site, anchors foreign direct investment in the region, and IDA has added a fast-start office called the Landing Space in the town centre for new arrivals. Sligo County Council is the local authority for the town as well as the county.

Towns like Sligo carry a mixed stock of roofs. Alongside modern offices there are older workshops, stores, garages, depots and commercial premises, many put up or extended at a time when corrugated asbestos cement was a routine choice for a low-cost industrial roof. Some of those buildings now house very different businesses from the ones they were built for, and their roofs have rarely had attention. A leak over a stock room, a server cupboard or a customer area gets noticed quickly, and it is usually then that an owner discovers the roof is asbestos cement.

Sligo’s weather does those roofs no favours. No station in County Sligo has a full published Met Éireann normal, so Belmullet in Co. Mayo is the nearest long-term reference, recording about 1,242 mm of rain a year over 1991 to 2020. Persistent wet weather erodes the cement surface and works at the laps, fixings and rooflights of a commercial roof. Encapsulation seals it in place. Gaco urethane coatings, U91 and U92 being the grades used on asbestos cement, are applied over the existing sheets to form a continuous waterproof layer, avoiding the disruption of stripping the roof off a working building. The approved installer surveys the roof, records vents and rooflights, replaces broken sheets and prepares the surface without abrasion. Duratite supplies the materials, and the approved installer carries out the work.

For a business, the legal side is straightforward to set out. 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, and the Health and Safety Authority enforces them. The installer’s risk assessment covers notification, safe access to a fragile roof and control of debris. Sligo County Council is the building control authority; if the roof insulation is changed, TGD L 2022 applies. The island-of-Ireland reference project for this work is SAICA Warrenpoint, Co. Down.

For a Sligo town premises, say whether you own or lease the building, what the business below does, and whether there are rooflights, extract fans or signage fixed to the roof. That helps the approved installer plan a survey that fits around your opening hours.