Pre-ticked for five categories, because demolition triggers more of the list than any other trade. The three rows below are a starting point for the survey, the sequence and the boundary.
A management survey is the wrong survey
There are two kinds and the difference decides whether anybody is protected. A management survey is for a building carrying on in normal use: it locates asbestos that could be disturbed by ordinary occupancy and it deliberately does not go looking inside the fabric. A refurbishment and demolition survey is intrusive, and it is the one that opens floors, ceilings and voids because something is about to be knocked down.
Turning up with a management survey and demolishing to it is the most common serious failure on this kind of job, and it is not obvious from the front page. Both documents say survey at the top. Check the type before anything is priced, because finding out afterwards means the whole site is a contaminated site.
The sequence is the control, not the exclusion zone
Structures come down in an order somebody worked out, and the order exists because removing one element changes what the rest is doing. Load paths shift, restraint disappears, and a wall that was stable an hour ago is now a free-standing panel with the wind on it.
That is why the sequence comes from an engineer for that specific structure, and why the propping goes in before the load path is removed rather than after somebody notices movement. A SWMS that describes an exclusion zone and a machine but not a sequence is describing what happens after it goes wrong.
Measure the debris envelope, not the building line
Material does not fall straight down. It bounces, it rolls, and a section pushed rather than pulled travels. An exclusion zone drawn on the footprint of the building is smaller than the area material can reach, sometimes by a lot, and it gets drawn there because the footprint is the line that is already on the drawing.
Set it from the height and the method, and re-measure it whenever either changes. Swapping a long-reach machine for a shorter one changes where the operator stands, which changes where the material lands.
The road is the limb demolition crews leave off
Demolition ticks almost everything on the list, which is exactly why the one that gets left is the traffic corridor. Anything coming down next to a road, a footpath or a rail line sits inside it, and it is also the limb that decides whether you need a formal closure or permit rather than a fence and a hope.
Dust is a neighbour problem before it is a health problem
Silica from concrete and masonry is the health hazard, and suppression at the point of generation is the control that works: a fixed supply to the machine, running as a programme rather than a hose fetched when somebody complains.
The reason it is worth designing properly is that dust leaving the boundary is the thing that generates complaints, and complaints generate visits. A site that controls dust well is usually controlling everything else well, and inspectors know that too.
Services get killed at the boundary, not at the meter
An isolation at the meter is an isolation somebody can reverse, and on a demolition site there is usually nobody left who knows the building well enough to say what a given switch does.
Disconnection at the boundary by the utility, with a certificate, is the only version that survives the machine arriving. That takes weeks to arrange with some suppliers, which is why it belongs in the programme rather than in the week before. Every genuinely serious demolition incident involving services traces back to somebody believing a supply was dead because it had been switched off.
Common questions
Is a SWMS enough for a demolition job, or do I need more?
More. The SWMS covers the high risk construction work, and above it sits the demolition plan and the engineer sequence for that structure. In several jurisdictions demolition work also needs a licensed demolisher and notification to the regulator depending on the height and method. The SWMS is the working document; it is not the permission.
Which demolition limb applies to a non-load-bearing wall?
The second one. It covers work affecting the physical integrity of the structure and it does not require the element to be carrying load, which is why soft strip and internal removals land inside the list far more often than people expect. The safest reading is that if you cannot say what the element was doing, it is inside.
Do I need the survey before pricing or before starting?
Before pricing, in practice. A refurbishment and demolition survey changes the method, the programme and the licensed removal cost, so finding it after the price is agreed turns a safety document into a commercial argument, and safety loses those more often than it should.
How is the exclusion zone decided?
From the height of the element, the method of bringing it down and the ground it lands on, rather than from the building line. It gets re-measured whenever the machine, the method or the sequence changes. A zone set on day one and never revisited is the version that ends up too small halfway through.
Can I use one SWMS for soft strip and structural demolition?
They are different activities with different hazards and usually different crews, so they are two statements. Soft strip is about what is in the building; structural demolition is about what the building is doing. Combining them produces a document that is vague about both.