When I was in high school, and throughout the first 3 years of college (during summers, and winter break) I worked for a roofing company. The crew that I was on installed mostly large hot-asphalt roofs (aka hot-tar) which included tearing off the old roof and installing a new roof to replace it. As hot-asphalt can't be applied when it's wet out, when it rained we would stock under-construction houses with drywall, install insulation, stock shingles on roofs, and install composition shingles -- not any fun, but it kept us busy. We couldn't run asphalt in the rain as the asphalt was about 650 degrees (Farenheit) in the kettle -- (that big, black, noisy, loud, hot piece of machinery you see on the ground that has a pipe up to the roof) -- as it would vaporize and boil when the slightest bit of moisture touched it -- 650 degrees is just slightly more than 3X the temperature of boiling water - so it's hot!.
There was no OSHA at the time (or if there was, we were so far off of the beaten path in a small town in Oregon that my employer wasn't concerned with it) - so few, if any, safety measures were in place. We often worked with no shirts on, no protective gear other than gloves and boots, and never any safety harnesses -- not a big deal on hot-asphalt roofs, as they're generally fairly flat, but on the steeped pitched roofs of the old Victorian homes on which we worked, safety harnesses would have been a good idea! I worked on a small pitched roof on the side of a grain elevator once - about 7 stories up (74 ft), and the guy with whom I was working, a very experienced roofer, scrambled after a piece of equipment that started to slide and he almost went with it (see photo below) -- not very smart and could have cost him his life -- no harnesses that day either. Note that the building on the left is about 100 yards closer than the grain elevator on the right, so the scale appears distorted -- it was way up there! When I was about 17 years old, I once packed a 30-ft ladder on my shoulder, up the side of that same grain elevator, via a built-in vertical ladder embedded in the side of the building. Again, no safety equipment -- lucky I'm still alive!
There was no OSHA at the time (or if there was, we were so far off of the beaten path in a small town in Oregon that my employer wasn't concerned with it) - so few, if any, safety measures were in place. We often worked with no shirts on, no protective gear other than gloves and boots, and never any safety harnesses -- not a big deal on hot-asphalt roofs, as they're generally fairly flat, but on the steeped pitched roofs of the old Victorian homes on which we worked, safety harnesses would have been a good idea! I worked on a small pitched roof on the side of a grain elevator once - about 7 stories up (74 ft), and the guy with whom I was working, a very experienced roofer, scrambled after a piece of equipment that started to slide and he almost went with it (see photo below) -- not very smart and could have cost him his life -- no harnesses that day either. Note that the building on the left is about 100 yards closer than the grain elevator on the right, so the scale appears distorted -- it was way up there! When I was about 17 years old, I once packed a 30-ft ladder on my shoulder, up the side of that same grain elevator, via a built-in vertical ladder embedded in the side of the building. Again, no safety equipment -- lucky I'm still alive!
In any event, what prompted this post was an email that I received from a group in Massachusetts that is working to educate the roofing public regarding the dangers of older roofing materials that may have contained asbestos, and could be a contributing factor to roofer contracting mesothelioma. I don't know anything about this organization or the information above/beyond what is contained on this website (link below), but if you know a roofer that might be affected/afflicted, they may want to avail themselves of this information:
Click Here for Additional Information
Click Here for Additional Information
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