Asbestos removal and remediation in Carstairs

What Carstairs’ housing means for asbestos

The settlement started with a stopping house on the Rosebud River in 1883, and moved when the Calgary & Edmonton Railway laid its townsite about four kilometres west in 1890. A post office followed in 1900 and a school district in 1901. Carstairs was incorporated as a village in 1903 and did not become a town until 1966.

The 2021 Census counted 4,898 people and 1,837 occupied homes, up 20.1 per cent in five years and more than doubled since 2001. The town’s own 2024 Housing Needs Assessment found roughly 70 per cent of residents commute out for work. New subdivisions — Scarlett Ranch, with some 1,300 homes planned, and Mandalay Estates backing onto the golf course — account for most of that growth.

So the asbestos question in Carstairs is a question about a fairly small part of town: the blocks around Centre Street and the older streets near the original townsite. Two of the oldest buildings still standing, Knox Presbyterian Church and the McCaig House, both date from 1901 and sit at the Carstairs Heritage Centre. Houses of roughly that vintage, and everything put up through to about 1990, are where floor tile, black mastic, ceiling texture, joint compound, pipe wrap and attic vermiculite turn up.

The practical rule does not change with the town. Asbestos left alone behind a wall is not hurting anyone. Asbestos going through a saw is a different material entirely, and the point of testing first is that a lab result costs a fraction of what an uncontrolled removal costs to put right.

How a job in Carstairs runs

The steps are the same ones on our asbestos removal page. Nothing is skipped because the job is in Carstairs rather than Calgary.

• Testing. Samples go to an accredited third-party lab and you get the result in writing before anything is disturbed. A clean result ends it there.
• Notification. Alberta OHS must be notified at least 72 hours before any work that could release asbestos fibres, and the notice is filed per address. We file it for every restricted-area job.
• Permits. The Town’s Planning and Development department at 844 Centre Street (403-337-3341) handles development permits, and Carstairs is on IJD Inspections Ltd.’s municipality list for Safety Codes permits. Confirm the current requirements with the Town before you apply — agencies change, and the provincial rule that fibre-releasing material comes out before demolition applies either way.
• Disposal. Carstairs is a member of the Mountain View Regional Waste Management Commission, whose landfill west of Didsbury bans asbestos outright. It is on the commission’s published list of materials not accepted at its sites. That leaves two lawful routes: south to Calgary, or north to the City of Red Deer’s Waste Management Facility on 40 Avenue, which takes asbestos as special waste with 24 hours’ notice (403-340-2583). Shepard Landfill in southeast Calgary is the only City site that accepts commercial asbestos, under a free Industrial Waste Permit and a booked appointment requested by 10 a.m. the day before. The rate is $200 a tonne, rising to $220 in February 2026. Material is wetted before bagging, double-bagged in 6-mil polyethylene and sealed, and you get the weight ticket and the manifest.
• Travel. Carstairs is about 48 kilometres north of Calgary on Highway 2A, roughly half an hour, on the same run as Crossfield and Didsbury. Travel is priced into the written quote — no separate mileage line.

Tornado and hail country

On 1 July 2023 an EF4 tornado — 275 km/h winds, a track 15.3 kilometres long and up to 620 metres wide — ran east across Mountain View County between Didsbury and Carstairs. It was the strongest tornado recorded in Alberta since Edmonton in 1987. Reports at the time put five homes destroyed roughly two kilometres north of Carstairs near the junction of Highway 2A and Highway 581, with more damaged. The year before, on 1 August 2022, hail along the QEII between Calgary and Red Deer smashed windows on some seventy vehicles.

Storm damage on an older house is rarely just a roof. Once water is in the attic and the wall cavities, the material that has to come out is whatever the water reached — and in a pre-1990 house that can mean vermiculite, old insulation, textured ceiling and joint compound. We sample first, dry immediately where the material is clean, and handle both the water damage and any mold that follows.

If you searched for an abatement company in Carstairs, this is the page.

Related reading

• Where asbestos waste goes in Calgary
• A flooded basement: the first 24 hours
• What asbestos removal costs in the Calgary area