Skylight Screen Fall Protection

Skylights provide a lot of natural light to the building and are more common than one would think on rooftops. Having protection for skylights is often overlooked because they aren’t initially seen as a fall hazard on the roof.

 OSHA regards a skylight as a “hole”, meaning it is an opening in the roof of a building through which a person may fall that is 4 feet or more above a lower level. This states that in the event that a skylight is constructed using a plastic material subject to fracture, as glass would be, then the skylight requires at minimum a skylight screen that can support at least twice the maximum intended load that may imposed on the cover (skylight screen) at any one time.

Sierra Nevada Corporation is an aerospace and defense solutions company who had 15 unprotected skylights on the rooftop of one of their facilities. They reached out back in February 2020 after they were internally instructed that they needed protection for the aforementioned skylights.

This project was put on pause due to the pandemic shortly after their initial contact with Simplified Safety. The company eventually reconnected with us in July 2022 when they were able to revisit this project. The facilities manager didn’t want to attach anything to the curb or the skylight directly and preferred something minimal upkeep.

Our fall protection specialists met with their team and presented both Skylight Screens and Kee Dome as possible solutions. After comparing the cost difference and installation of the two products, ultimately they decided on skylight screens that don’t penetrate, specifically our Non-Penetrating Curb Style: Model STS. Utilizing the skylight screens for the 15 skylights made the project quick, easy, and met all the requirements they needed to achieve.