It is most often during the asbestos pre-sale diagnosis that the owners discover what they feared for a long time: a roofing in asbestos fiber cement sheets. If he hadn’t built it themselves, they once bought seemingly healthy real estate that turned out to be a source of exposure to asbestos risk a few years later. This then appears to be the risk of making the house less attractive on the real estate market. The asbestos-containing fiber cement roof is certainly not a selling point, but neither is it an insurmountable handicap either for the seller or for the buyer of a property. What it’s good to know and deal with asbestos-fiber roofing. With the Asbestos Siding this is important.
The discovery of asbestos on the roof
This discovery of asbestos on the roof is most often made just before the signing of the deed of sale when the notary requests the technical pre-sale diagnostic file. Whether you bought the house before the asbestos diagnosis obligation or were a tenant without mention of the presence of asbestos, you could not know that all or part of a fiber cement roof contained asbestos.
As a reminder: The asbestos diagnosis before rental relates only to the materials in list A of the decree of June 26, 2013 modifying the decree of December 12, 2020 relating to the criteria for assessing the state of conservation of the materials and list A products; that is to say only on the brittle materials located inside the housing (flocking, insulation and false ceilings).
But when carrying out the asbestos pre-sale diagnosis which covers many more materials (list B) and even those located outside the home, the verdict seems to fall as a sanction for the seller and a brake for the Buyer. Do not panic to have neither for one or the other provided you know the level of probability of the risk, the precautions and solutions to avoid it. For the painting asbestos siding this is important.
Faced with asbestos, don’t panic, but conscience
No, do not panic because the fiber cement roof turns out to contain asbestos, but make people aware of the possible risk and especially of the responsibilities entailed by this presence of the risk.
- The owner of a building can be held responsible for the side effects (often fatal in the event of ingestion or inhalation) of the dispersion of asbestos fibers as well for the occupants, outside workers and the neighborhood.
- Fiber cement roofing sheets installed before the asbestos ban may contain up to 15% asbestos. However, this type of roofing was widely distributed from the 1970s until 1997 (date of the ban on the use of asbestos).
If a roof covering for a house, garage, outbuilding or shed is made of fiber cement and dates from this period, there is a very high probability that the fiber cement contains asbestos, which the real estate diagnostician has most often confirmed. . The serious problem posed by these roofing fiber cement sheets is due to their age and their exposure to the elements. The sun, precipitation but also shocks, vegetation and mosses often disintegrated these old roofs and the asbestos they contain can then spread in the air and in the water as the degradation .
