Good Luck Is Not a Height Safety Plan

Four workers spent up to four hours each on a scaffold that a safety regulator had already shut down. None of them knew it was defective, and none of them knew they were not meant to be up there at all.

That is what SafeWork SA found on a residential building site at Salisbury East. Inspectors had already attended the site after a complaint and identified serious defects in the perimeter scaffold, including missing kickboards, excessive gaps in the walkways and unsafe access. They issued a prohibition notice, which ordered all access to the scaffold to stop until the defects were fixed. Six days later they came back and found workers installing upper level windows from that same scaffold.

If you own or manage a building, this is the part that should sit with you. You are accountable for what happens when someone climbs onto your roof, and you are rarely standing there when they do it. The workers in this case were not told the scaffold was banned, and the notice was never put on display. They had no way of knowing they were carrying real risk with every step.

Every worker who goes up deserves to come back down in one piece. The Deputy President who sentenced the company said the lack of any falls that day was “simple good luck”. They should not have been relying on good luck, she said, because a fall from that height carries the risk of death or serious injury.

We have seen how easily safety information gets lost between the people who manage a building and the people who climb onto it. We understand the pressure you are under to keep work moving and keep costs down. Anchored Height Safety designs, installs, certifies and maintains the height safety systems that let qualified tradespeople access commercial and mixed-use rooftops. We do not carry out the rooftop work itself. We make the roof safe so your trades can do their job, and we build and certify to the relevant Australian Standards, including AS/NZS 1891 and AS 1657. This case was about scaffold on a house, and our work is commercial rooftops, but the lesson carries straight across.

Safe rooftop access usually starts with a proper way up and a system that keeps a worker away from the edge, or arrests them if they slip. That might be a fixed roof ladder to a roof hatch, a static horizontal lifeline running along the roof, anchor points for travel restraint, and edge protection where the layout calls for it. A tradesperson clips on, stays connected and gets the job done.

The second half of this case matters just as much as the scaffold itself. The failure was not only the defective equipment. It was that nobody told the workers, and the notice that would have warned them was never displayed. SafeWork pointed to the same thing in its statement: the case shows how much depends on having systems that communicate safety information to workers and contractors.

That is exactly what our documentation is built to do. When a tradesperson arrives at your roof, our records tell them what is installed, what each item is approved for and when it was last inspected. They turn up prepared and work with confidence, and nobody has to guess whether the system will hold. We can assess your roof, install and certify the access system, and keep it inspected on schedule so it stays fit for use. Prohibition notices apply here in Victoria too, and WorkSafe Victoria inspectors can issue them if they believe an activity carries a serious risk.

Picture the version where this is handled. Your building keeps running, the fans, drains and units get serviced on time, and every tradesperson who came up your roof went home that night. You hold clear documentation, and if an auditor or an insurer asks, you can show that access to your roof is controlled and certified. That is peace of mind you can point to.

Now picture the other version. Rockdale Building Solutions was convicted and fined a total of $35,000, reduced to $21,000 for an early guilty plea, and ordered to pay legal costs and a levy on top. Behind the money sits a recorded conviction, a regulator investigation, and four workers who were exposed to a fall that could have killed them. Skip the safe access, or lose track of what is compliant, and you are trusting the same good luck the court warned about.

Do not wait for a complaint or an inspector to tell you your roof access falls short. Call us on 03 9555 3586, email sales@anchored.com.au or visit anchored.com.au to book an assessment and find out whether access to your roof is safe and compliant.