Demolition Editing and Proofreading Services

The survey says no asbestos was found. It does not say there is none — it says that in the areas the surveyor could reach, on the day they visited, with the floor down and the ceiling up and a tenant still trading in half the building, nothing was found. That distinction is written somewhere in the report. Whether it is written where a demolition operative with a breaker will encounter it is a different question.

We edit what demolition contractors and surveyors produce — refurbishment and demolition survey reports and their limitations, no-access schedules and caveats, asbestos removal and management plans, demolition method statements and sequences, structural stability and pre-weakening documentation, deleterious material and hazardous waste documentation, site clearance and waste transfer records, notifications and permits, party wall and neighbour communications, dust, noise and vibration control documentation, and soft strip and salvage documentation. Our editors work on the part of a survey that says what was not looked at.

The survey's limitations and no-access schedule are the most consequential paragraphs in demolition documentation, and their failure is placement. A caveat on page four of a hundred-page report, in the standard wording every survey carries, does not reach the person who will be first to open a void. We work through these so the areas not accessed are listed at the front, individually, in terms somebody on site can locate — the room, the level, the specific void, riser or floor build-up — rather than as a percentage or a generic statement; so each entry says why access was refused or impossible and what would be needed to complete it, since "occupied" and "requires scaffold" have different consequences; so the presumption applied to unsurveyed areas is stated as an instruction rather than a status: presume asbestos, stop and call, do not break out; so the survey type is unmistakable, given that a management survey being used for demolition is one of the most common serious failures in this industry; so the date is prominent along with what has changed since, because a survey done before a tenant fit-out describes a different building; so the sampling density and what it does and does not prove is explained in a sentence; and so the report says who to ring and what the trigger is. Surveys presented this way stop work before the breaker rather than after.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including surveys, plans and site information. We are editors rather than surveyors, analysts or safety practitioners, and we offer no view on surveys, materials or methods. What we can do is put the limitations where the person with the breaker will find them.