Asbestos removal and remediation in Crossfield

What Crossfield’s housing means for asbestos

Crossfield began in 1892 as a station on the Calgary & Edmonton Railway, was incorporated as a village in 1907, and did not become a town until 1980, when the population finally passed a thousand. The 2021 Census counted 3,599 residents and 1,326 occupied homes, up 20.7 per cent in five years, and the Alberta Regional Dashboard put the 2025 estimate at 4,075. It is one of the faster-growing communities in the province.

That history splits the town neatly for our purposes. The original townsite — Railway Street and the blocks around Ross, Smith and Hammond — holds the older housing. Vista Crossing on the northwest side and Iron Landing on the northeast went up in the last twenty years, and nothing built there will contain asbestos.

In the older half, the materials to think about are the ordinary ones: floor tile and the black mastic under it, textured and stipple ceilings, drywall joint compound, pipe and duct wrap, and vermiculite in the attic. All of them were still going into Canadian homes into the late 1980s. None of them is a hazard sitting undisturbed behind a wall. Every one of them becomes a hazard the moment a reciprocating saw goes through it.

Crossfield also has a fire in its past that shaped what stands downtown. On New Year’s Day 1924 a hotel fire destroyed a block of the village, and a second fire a week later took more — between them about a quarter of a million dollars of damage in 1924 money, in a village that size. The commercial core was rebuilt afterwards. Buildings from that rebuild rarely carry asbestos in the original structure. They carry it in what was added later: the tile that went over the plank floor in the 1960s, the suspended ceiling, the boiler lagging.

How a job in Crossfield runs

The steps 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 Crossfield 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. Development permits come from the Town of Crossfield’s Development Officer and Municipal Planning Commission on Ross Street (403-946-5565). Building and other Safety Codes permits have been handled by IJD Inspections Ltd. since 1 July 2024, replacing Park Enterprises, and a building permit is required for a demolition. The provincial requirement that fibre-releasing material come out before the structure does applies whether or not the permit form mentions it.
• Disposal. This is the part that catches people out here. The Crossfield Transfer Site on Laut Crescent takes household waste and recycling only, and Rocky View County operates no landfill of its own — it points residents at the transfer sites in Airdrie, Beiseker, Cochrane and Crossfield, none of which accept asbestos. So asbestos from a Crossfield job comes back to Calgary. 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. Budget for the round trip; anyone quoting you a Crossfield job without it has not priced the haul.
• Travel. Crossfield is about 43 kilometres north of Calgary on Highway 2A, roughly half an hour from the north end of the city, and it sits on the same run as Airdrie and Carstairs. Travel is priced into the written quote for every job outside Calgary — no separate mileage line, no surprise on the invoice.

Hail, wind and what gets wet

Crossfield sits in the part of central Alberta that collects summer storms. A tornado warning was issued for the area on 14 July 2019, and on 8 August 2026 a severe storm put the town under the most intense part of its core, with quarter-sized hail and damaging winds, leaving around 2,100 customers in the region without power.

Storm damage turns into our kind of work by a predictable route. Hail lifts or splits shingles and breaks windows; the rain behind it goes into the attic and down the wall cavity; and within a couple of days there is wet insulation and wet drywall that has to come out. In a house on the old townsite, the wet material that needs removing may well be the material that needs testing first — which is why the test comes before the demolition, not after it. If the house is newer, it is a straight water damage and mold remediation job and we can start drying immediately.

If you searched for an abatement company in Crossfield, this is the page. We also cover Airdrie ten minutes south and Carstairs ten minutes north on the same terms.

Related reading

• Where asbestos waste goes in Calgary
• I found asbestos. What do I do now?
• What asbestos removal costs in the Calgary area