Asbestos Removal in Cloverdale, BC

Cloverdale has some of the oldest building stock in Surrey, including character homes near the historic town core where asbestos siding and vermiculite attic insulation are still in place.

Cloverdale is one of the oldest parts of Surrey, with the original town core and heritage character homes dating back to the early 1900s. While asbestos-fibre insulation products came later, many of those early Cloverdale properties were renovated repeatedly through the 1940s to 1980s, which means layers of different generations of materials. It's not unusual to open up a Cloverdale heritage home and find original plaster walls, a layer of drywall compound from a 1960s update and vinyl tile on the floor from a 1970s kitchen renovation on top of original hardwood.

Vermiculite attic insulation is especially common in Cloverdale and on the rural acreage properties east of the town core. Zonolite, the dominant vermiculite product sold through the 1950s to 1980s, was produced at a mine in Libby, Montana that was naturally contaminated with tremolite asbestos. Any attic with grey, pebble-like insulation should be assumed contaminated until tested. Many Cloverdale farmhouses and rural properties have had vermiculite blown into the roof cavity and left untouched for decades.

The acreage and hobby-farm properties on Cloverdale's fringes bring another category of material: corrugated asbestos-cement roofing and flat asbestos-cement siding panels used on outbuildings, barns and equipment sheds. This was a standard agricultural building material through the mid-20th century. It's generally non-friable when intact, but any maintenance, repair or demolition of those structures requires professional handling and disposal at a certified facility.