Asbestos removal and remediation in Airdrie

What Airdrie’s housing means for asbestos

The 2021 Census counted about 26,300 occupied homes in Airdrie. Only about 230 of them were built in 1960 or earlier, and roughly 2,250 date from 1961 to 1980 — the two decades when asbestos was used most heavily in Canadian housing. Another 1,600 went up between 1981 and 1990, when asbestos was fading out of most products but still turning up in drywall compound, floor tile and vermiculite insulation. Put together, about one home in six in Airdrie was built before 1991. The other five out of six were built from the 1990s onward, and nearly three-quarters of the city’s homes date from 2001 or later.

That has a practical consequence. In a 2005 Airdrie house, asbestos is rarely the concern — the job is mold after a leak, hail damage, a basement flood or a strip-out for a renovation. In the older streets, the picture is closer to Calgary’s: pre-1980 bungalows and split-levels where flooring, textured ceilings, joint compound and attic insulation should all be tested before anyone starts cutting. Airdrie was incorporated as a village in 1909 and did not become a town until 1974, and the neighbourhood the city calls Old Town, just north of downtown, is where most of that earlier housing sits. The six-lane highway to Calgary arrived in the 1970s and the growth that followed it is what built the rest of the city.

If your house is from the 1990s or later and you are planning a renovation, testing is usually optional. If it is from before 1990, test first. A lab result costs a fraction of what an uncontrolled removal costs to put right.

How a job in Airdrie runs

The steps below are the same ones on our asbestos removal page, where you can watch a 30-second walk-through of one of our own jobs. Nothing is skipped because the job is in Airdrie rather than Calgary.

If you searched for an abatement company in Airdrie, this is the page. We also cover Crossfield ten minutes north and Carstairs beyond it, on the same terms as Airdrie. And if the reason you are reading is a basement renovation in Airdrie, the strip-out and the asbestos check come first — we do both, so the renovation crew starts on a clean, cleared basement.

• Testing. We collect samples and send them to an accredited third-party lab. Results come back in writing, and if the result is negative your renovation goes ahead with nothing further from us.
• Notification. Alberta OHS must be notified at least 72 hours before any work that could release asbestos fibres, per address. We file that notice for every restricted-area job.
• Permits. The City of Airdrie requires a permit for building demolitions through its Safety Codes office. Its permit pages do not currently spell out an asbestos requirement the way Calgary’s do, but the provincial rule is the same everywhere: material that can release asbestos fibres has to come out before a structure is demolished. We tell you that before you apply, not after the inspector asks.
• Disposal. Airdrie’s own transfer site on Highway 567 does not take asbestos, and neither do Rocky View County’s sites. Asbestos waste from Airdrie goes to the City of Calgary’s Shepard Landfill, the only Calgary facility that accepts it: double-bagged in 6-mil poly, wetted, sealed, under a City industrial waste permit, with a disposal appointment booked by 10 a.m. the business day before. You get the weight ticket and the manifest.
• Travel. Airdrie’s city centre is about 32 kilometres from Calgary’s, roughly half an hour on the QEII. Travel is priced into the written quote for every job outside Calgary — there is no separate mileage line and no surprise on the invoice.

Asbestos removal in Airdrie: what it costs and how long it takes

Airdrie is twenty minutes up the QE2 from our Calgary base, so asbestos removal in Airdrie is priced from the same published ranges as Calgary with the short drive built into the quote — a sampling visit is $95 more than in the city, and removal jobs carry no separate travel line at all. A popcorn ceiling or a bathroom floor is usually a one- or two-day job including the 72-hour Alberta OHS notice, containment and clearance; a whole-basement strip-out in one of the older Airdrie neighbourhoods is a week or two. Every quote is itemized and fixed before we start.

Most Airdrie housing is too new to have asbestos in it, which is why we would rather you test first than pay for containment you may not need. The exceptions are the original town core and the acreages around it, where 1960s and 1970s houses still carry ceiling texture, floor tile and drywall compound from the asbestos years.

Weather, water and the other half of our work

Airdrie sits in what the insurance industry calls Hail Alley. The August 2014 storms did more than $25 million in damage across the city and were declared a catastrophe event; the storm of 7 August 2025 brought large hail and flooded low-lying streets. Hail is how water gets into a house that never had a leak before — through a cracked roof, a broken window or siding that no longer sheds rain — and once water is in, mold follows within days. We handle the tear-out and drying, and if the damaged material is old enough to contain asbestos, that gets tested and removed first so nobody is sanding asbestos-bearing drywall into the air.

Flood restoration in Airdrie starts with the same call: get the water off, get the air moving, and get someone in who can tell what is drywall and what is drywall with asbestos in it. We extract, remove wet material, and dry with monitored equipment, then hand you the moisture log for your insurer. Mold remediation in Airdrie is usually the second call, two or three weeks after a flood that was dried with a fan and hope; that one needs containment, negative air and removal of the affected material, not a surface treatment. Both are quoted in writing and both carry the same travel arrangement as the asbestos work.

Airdrie’s tap water comes from the City of Calgary’s treatment plants through supply mains to local reservoirs, so the freeze-thaw and chinook cycle that floods Calgary basements in February does the same thing here. For a flooded basement, call the moment you find it; the first 24 hours decide whether it is a drying job or a demolition.

Related reading

• A flooded basement: the first 24 hours
• Ice damming and what it does to older roofs
• What asbestos removal costs in the Calgary area