What to Do When You Have Asbestos Siding in Virginia Beach, VA

Methods of Dealing With Asbestos Siding for Homes in Virginia Beach, VA

Do you have asbestos siding on your Virginia Beach, VA home? If it was built any time between 1920 and the early '80s, the short answer is, you might. If you do, sooner or later, it’s going to be a problem.

Envirotex is a licensed, asbestos inspection and abatement contractor. We offer:

• Safe and vigilant containment and removal following the highest safety procedures
• Thorough site decontamination
• Lawful disposal
• All asbestos testing performed by an independent, certified lab

Let’s start with the fact that homeowners aren’t under any sort of legal obligation to inform you if the home you’re buying has asbestos anywhere in or on it. In fact, since there’s no legal requirement, the person you bought it from might not even know for sure because the person they bought it from didn’t say either way.

The other thing to consider is that you may have asbestos siding on your Virginia Beach, VA home, but at some point prior to your purchase of the house, a former owner simply sided over it. Now it’s just sitting there. A problem waiting to happen.

As to why it’s a problem, you’ve probably seen one of those late-night infomercials warning about the dangers of mesothelioma. It’s a deadly form of cancer that can be caused by breathing in asbestos particles.

Whether you’ve got asbestos siding on your Virginia Beach, VA home or somewhere else inside it, as it ages, it gets brittle. It’s already fairly prone to breaking, but that problem gets worse over time. When it breaks apart, it crumbles, releasing tiny particles into the air and that’s the health risk.

Unfortunately, by the time the material was banned by the EPA, upwards of 80% of homes and office buildings across the country contained some form of asbestos. While there hasn’t to date been a national drive to get rid of asbestos in all its forms, it’s something that individual property owners have been working on for decades, and while some progress has been made, there’s still a great deal of work that needs to be done.

That brings us back to you. The only way to know for sure whether or not you’ve got asbestos siding on your Virginia Beach, VA home is to have it tested. When you call on us, we’ll do more than just test for siding. We’ll be looking in every nook and cranny so we can locate it in whatever form it takes, wherever it might be.

Whatever we find, we’ll give you a full report, our professional recommendation, and a free, no-obligation estimate so you’ll have a clear understanding of what it will take to get rid of the problem once and for all. Then, assuming you’re comfortable with our estimate, we’ll proceed with our process.

Exactly how we handle asbestos in, on, or around your home depends on what form it takes. Where asbestos siding on your Virginia Beach, VA home is concerned, the current best practice is to lay down a foam sheath on top of it, then side over it.

It’s a good strategy, but it has a drawback. There’s only so many times you can re-side your home before you’ve got to tear all the old siding out and start fresh. That’s not something you want to leave to a general contractor, who won’t have the experience or the specialized equipment to handle its removal properly, which can lead to spreading potentially deadly asbestos particles all over your property.

If you’d like us to remove it, broadly speaking, our process works like this:

• Isolation – We’ll cordon off the area we’re removing your siding from so that as we proceed with the process, none of the particles generated by removal will escape the area where they might put you and your family at risk later on.
• Removal – Once the area has been isolated, we’ll proceed with removal in a safe, professional manner.
• Disposal – We’ll remove all of the asbestos from your property, disposing of it in a facility properly licensed and approved to handle it.
• Decontamination – As important as the physical removal is, decontamination is really the heart and soul of the process. Here, we’ll take steps to be sure that no stray particles remain to cause potential harm once we’ve finished our work.
• Testing – This is not always needed, but if and where testing is required, we’ll use a properly certified and accredited lab and share the results with you when we get them back.

Of course, asbestos can take a number of forms depending on where it is and how it’s used in your home. Our process for removal is functionally similar to what we described above, except for the following caveats:

Asbestos insulation – This is typically found in attic spaces and as insulation for pipes. Our process for removal is identical to what we described above.

Asbestos shingles – Here, it may be possible to cover the asbestos shingles with a protective layer and roof over the asbestos shingles. As with asbestos siding though, you can only get away with that for so long before you’ve got to tear everything out and start over. If you’ve reached that point, our process would work pretty much as described above.

Asbestos floor tiles – These reached the height of their popularity in the ’50s and early ‘60s so finding asbestos flooring tiles isn’t quite as common as some of the other items on our list.

If your home does have asbestos flooring tiles, then it may be possible to entomb them by pouring a layer of concrete over the flooring tiles and then installing some new type of flooring over that.

Unfortunately, there’s a hard limit to how many times you can do that, and if you’ve got several layers of older floor covering, we may have to rip it all out and start fresh, just like you ultimately have to do with shingles and siding. We’ll test and inspect to know for sure and let you know what your options are on this front. If it turns out that we have to take them out, or if that’s your preference, then our process works as described above.

We Don’t Stop With Just Asbestos

Although asbestos remediation is a big part of what we do, it’s just one of the great services we provide. Our skilled experts are well versed in dealing with a wide range of hazardous materials, so if you have a tricky, potentially dangerous substance on your property and you want it gone in order to minimize the risks for your family, give our office a call. We’ll be happy to talk it over with you and see what we can do to assist. As to what those other hazards might be, here are a couple more that we deal with on a regular basis:

Lead Paint

By now, the dangers of lead paint, like asbestos, are well known and understood. One key difference is that sellers are required to disclose to potential buyers that the home they’re interested in contains lead paint. Of course, they can only do that if they know it’s there. It’s entirely possible that the person they purchased the home didn’t know, so didn’t tell them, and now you live in a house that has lead paint somewhere in or on it.

While lead paint is moderately dangerous to healthy adults, it’s especially dangerous to the very young and the very old, with the very young being likely to pick up paint chips and put them in their mouths and the very old having increasingly compromised immune systems and being more prone to illness in general.

In either case, it’s just not something you want to expose yourself or your family to, so if you even suspect there might be lead paint somewhere in, on, or around your property, give our office a call, and we can perform an inspection and run some tests.

As outlined in the section on asbestos, if we find anything, we’ll give you an estimate on what remediation will cost and assuming you’re comfortable with that estimate, we’ll take care of the problem for you.

Mold

This is another big issue we deal with on a regular basis. All a mold colony needs to firmly establish itself is a dark, damp space, and unfortunately, most homes have lots of those. While it’s true that many species of mold aren’t deadly or even especially harmful, a good number of them are and either way, you don’t want mold ruining your home or its contents. Again, help is just a phone call away.

Don’t take any chances where your family’s health is concerned. Call us right away. We’ll be there when you need us.

About Envriotex Environmental Services

Established in Northern Virginia in 2000, Envirotex Environmental Services was founded on military service. While serving his country, the company's owner Mr. Freeman gained vast knowledge and experience in the environmental services field. His expertise in air monitoring and hazardous materials testing prepared him for his post-military career.