The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) prosecuted BRC Industrial Roofing Specialists Ltd and its managing director, Lee Berbridge, after an inspector saw the men while driving past the scene.
Crawley Magistrates' Court heard BRC had been contracted to oversheet a roof at Independent Business Park in East Grinstead. Oversheeting is when a metal grid system is fixed to a roof and insulation fibre is rolled out on top of the grid, after which a metal sheet is fixed on top.
On 5 January this year, HSE Inspector Russell Beckett was driving past the site when he saw two BRC employees standing on an asbestos roof.
The men had no means to stop them falling from the fragile roof and nothing to break their fall if they had tripped over the edge or fell through the roof.
Though they had been issued with lightweight staging boards, they were not using these to walk on as intended, and one man was spotted walking on the metal grid while the other was standing on the asbestos.
The inspector was so alarmed at what he saw that he immediately stopped the work with a prohibition notice and issued an improvement notice to ensure a risk assessment and correct procedures were in place before work could resume.
The HSE investigation showed that work was not properly planned or appropriately supervised and it was not carried out in a manner that was reasonably safe.
BRC Industrial Roofing Specialists Limited of Kings Yard, Kings Road, Long Ditton Surrey, pleaded guilty to Regulation 4 of the Work at Height Regulations 2005. The firm was fined a total of £2,500 and ordered to pay costs of £1,000.
The company's managing director, Lee Berbridge, of the same address, pleaded guilty to Regulation 4 of the Work at Height Regulations 2005. He was fined a total of £3,500 and ordered to pay costs of £1,653.
HSE inspector Russell Beckett said: "Working on roofs is a high-risk activity. Nearly a quarter of all roofers are killed in falls from height. Falls through fragile materials, such as rooflights and asbestos cement roofing sheets, account for more of these deaths than anything else.
"Employees who work on fragile roofs without the right equipment risk not knowing if their next step could be their last. It is sheer luck that in this case the two men were not severely injured or killed."
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