Asbestos removal and remediation in Didsbury

What Didsbury’s housing means for asbestos

Didsbury was settled by Mennonite families granted land in 1894, incorporated as a village in 1901 and a town in 1906. The 2021 Census recorded 5,070 residents and 2,047 occupied homes, down 3.8 per cent from 2016. That matters more than it sounds. In a town that grows twenty per cent in five years, most of the housing is new. In a town that shrinks slightly, almost everything standing is what was already there, and the pre-1990 share of the stock is correspondingly high.

The town also has an unusually well-documented reason for the age of its downtown. On 1 January 1914 fire destroyed the original business section — two blocks on Railway Avenue, some $300,000 of damage — and two more fires followed that March. After another fire in 1924 that started at the Liesemer hardware store, council passed a bylaw requiring masonry construction for all new downtown commercial buildings. The brick streetscape that went up under that bylaw is largely still there.

A 1920s brick building rarely has asbestos in its original fabric. What it has is a century of renovations laid on top: floor tile and black mastic from the 1950s and 60s, suspended ceilings, boiler and pipe lagging, drywall and joint compound from later remodels. The same applies to the older houses. Heritage buildings such as the 1902 CPR station, the 1906 Union Bank building that survived the 1914 fire, the 1907 Hiebert Residence and the 1907 Red Brick School — now the district museum, and used as a hospital during the 1918 influenza epidemic — are all old enough that the asbestos question is about what was added, not what was built.

How a job in Didsbury runs

The steps are the same ones on our asbestos removal page. Nothing is skipped because the job is in Didsbury 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 department (403-335-3391) handles development permits, and IJD Inspections Ltd. of Red Deer handles all Safety Codes permits for Didsbury (1-877-617-8776). A demolition needs a permit, and the provincial requirement that fibre-releasing material be removed first applies regardless of what the form asks for.
• Disposal. There is a landfill two kilometres northwest of town — the Mountain View Regional Waste Management Commission site — and it will not take this. Asbestos is on its published list of banned materials. So the waste from a Didsbury job travels: north to the City of Red Deer’s Waste Management Facility, which accepts asbestos as special waste with 24 hours’ notice (403-340-2583), or south 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.
• Travel. Didsbury sits roughly halfway between Calgary and Red Deer, off the QEII on Highway 582, on the same run as Carstairs and Olds. Travel is priced into the written quote — no separate mileage line.

The 2023 tornado, and what storm damage turns into

On 1 July 2023 an EF4 tornado touched down south of Didsbury and tracked east toward Carstairs — 275 km/h winds, 15.3 kilometres long, up to 620 metres wide, the strongest recorded in Alberta since Edmonton in 1987. RCMP reported fourteen houses affected and five destroyed between the two towns inside half an hour.

Most storm work is less dramatic than that and follows the same path: a damaged roof, water into the attic and down the walls, and within two or three days wet insulation and drywall that has to come out. On a Didsbury house, given the age of the stock, the material that got wet is often the material that needs testing first. We sample before demolition, dry immediately where the material is clean, and handle the water damage and any mold remediation that follows.

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

Related reading

• Where asbestos waste goes in Calgary
• I found asbestos. What do I do now?
• Asbestos removal, step by step