Asbestos removal and remediation in Red Deer

What Red Deer’s housing means for asbestos

Red Deer had 7,115 people in 1951, 27,431 in 1971 and 45,405 in 1981. The oil and gas discoveries after the Second World War made it, for a time in the late 1950s, possibly the fastest-growing city in Canada, and a second boom followed the petrochemical plants at Joffre and Prentiss. The 2021 Census counted 100,844 residents and about 40,500 occupied homes. Around 3,015 were built in 1960 or earlier, 10,815 between 1961 and 1980, and 5,680 in the 1980s. That is about 19,500 homes — 48 per cent of the city — built before 1991, a higher share than Calgary and far higher than any of the towns around it.

The older housing is not hard to find. In Waskasoo, the historic homes east of the creek date from 1905 to 1923 and are joined by a band of one-storey and storey-and-a-half houses built from about 1946 to 1955, some of them under the Veterans Land Act. Parkvale was subdivided in the boom of 1910 to 1913 and is the City’s textbook mature neighbourhood. In Riverside Meadows, north of the river, 83 per cent of dwellings were built before 1986 against 57 per cent citywide. Eastview, Michener Hill and West Park filled in through the 1950s and 60s — Eastview Junior High opened in 1956 and West Park Junior High in 1969.

In all of those neighbourhoods, a renovation or a tear-down starts with testing: floor tile and mastic, textured ceilings, drywall compound, pipe and boiler insulation, duct wrap, asbestos-cement siding and vermiculite in the attic are the usual finds.

How a job in Red Deer 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 Red Deer rather than Calgary.

If you searched for an abatement company in Red Deer, this is the page. We also cover the towns around it — Innisfail, Sylvan Lake, Penhold, Blackfalds and Lacombe — with travel confirmed on booking. Three Hills, east on Highway 21, is on the same list.

• Scheduling. Red Deer is about 147 kilometres and 90 minutes from Calgary on the QEII. We serve it as booked, scheduled work — abatement, demolition, mold remediation and strip-outs planned a few days out — and we say so plainly: for a burst pipe at midnight, a local emergency crew will reach you sooner than we can. Travel is priced into the written quote for every job outside Calgary — there is no separate mileage line and no surprise on the invoice.
• Testing. Samples to an accredited third-party lab; written results before any material is disturbed.
• 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 Red Deer’s demolition guideline requires that an Asbestos Abatement Report be provided to the Building Safety Codes Officer, lists asbestos floor tile, pipe wrap and insulation among the hazardous materials that must be removed by a qualified professional, and points contractors to OHS for the remediation rules. We produce that report as part of the job.
• Disposal. Red Deer does not need to send asbestos to Calgary. The City’s Waste Management Facility at 1709 40 Avenue accepts asbestos as special waste with 24 hours’ notice (403-340-BLUE); the 2025 bylaw rate is $104.50 per tonne with a $104.50 minimum. Wetted, double-bagged in 6-mil poly, sealed, and documented with a weight ticket and manifest.

Rivers, dams and a hospital

The Red Deer River flooded the flats of North Red Deer in 1915 and again in 1943, came close to a record in June 2005, and ran at 1,335 cubic metres per second in June 2013 — but since the Dickson Dam was built upstream, the city has been buffered from the worst of what the 2013 storm did further south. Water damage in Red Deer is more often the ordinary kind: spring melt in a 1960s basement, a failed hot-water tank, a roof that has been patched one time too many.

The city is also in the middle of the largest hospital redevelopment in Alberta’s history, a $1.8 billion expansion of the Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre that includes renovations to the existing main building alongside a new patient tower. Renovation of buildings from that era is where commercial abatement lives, and the same applies to the city’s older schools, which are seeing roof and mechanical upgrades: before a 1950s or 60s institutional building is opened up, its materials are surveyed and anything that can release fibres is removed under containment.

Related reading

• What asbestos removal costs
• Popcorn ceilings and asbestos: what to know
• Black mold in the basement: what it means