A homeowner up on Mayfield Lane rang last week wanting a quote on a re-roof and asked, almost as an aside, whether the old felt underneath would need testing. Fair question. The British Safety Council’s Annual Conference this October — Hidden Hazards, running as a free virtual event on the 20th and 21st — is putting silica dust and asbestos exposure squarely on the agenda for anyone working on roofs built before 2000, and it’s worth Wadhurst homeowners knowing why.
Cutting concrete tiles, cement fibre sheeting or old slate releases respirable crystalline silica, and it’s the stuff you can’t see that does the damage — the fine dust that settles in the lungs over years, not the visible cloud. Mastercraft cut wet wherever possible now, running water suppression on the disc rather than dry-cutting, and where that’s not practical it’s M-class extraction on the saw and an FFP3 mask, not the paper ones some crews still turn up in.
Asbestos is the other side of it. A lot of the flat-roof garages and extensions around Frant and Pembury still carry old asbestos cement sheeting under a felt overlay, and disturbing it without knowing is how people end up with real problems twenty years down the line. If a roof predates 2000, it gets treated as suspect material until proven otherwise — that’s just how it’s done now, not a sales tactic.
None of this changes the actual roofing — still Code 4 lead on the abutments, still a 150mm lap on the breather membrane, still proper batten gauge to the tile manufacturer’s spec. It just means the bit nobody sees, the prep and the dust control, gets taken as seriously as the bit that ends up on the roof.
If you’re weighing up roof repairs in Wadhurst or anywhere around Tunbridge Wells, Mastercraft will tell you plainly whether your roof needs testing before anyone goes near it with a grinder — details at mastercraftroofing.co.uk/.
