Kings Mountain Asbestos Abatement, Cleveland County

What is distinctive about Kings Mountain is not that its buildings are old, it is how evenly the age is spread. Across roughly 4,947 housing units, about 10.3 percent predate 1940, 8.1 percent came out of the 1940s, 10.2 percent the 1950s, 11.1 percent the 1960s and 16.6 percent the 1970s. That adds to 56.2 percent built before 1980, with a median build year of 1976, but no single decade dominates.

The practical consequence is that you cannot read a Kings Mountain street and guess its era. Blocks are mixed. A 1930s cottage, a postwar bungalow and a 1972 ranch sit within sight of one another, and only one of them may have anything worth sampling. Guessing by appearance is unreliable here in a way it is not in towns with a single building boom.

Margrace Mill Village and the Neisler houses

The Margrace Mill Village Historic District was added to the National Register in May 2009 and contains 57 contributing buildings dating from about 1919 to 1956. The Neisler family textile company began building them in 1919 to house workers at the Margrace and Patricia mills, and construction continued for close to four decades.

That 1919 to 1956 span is the detail that matters. It covers the decades when asbestos-containing building products were most heavily used in American construction, which means a large share of these houses were built squarely inside that window. It also means the district is not uniform. A 1921 house and a 1954 house in the same village were built with different materials by different methods, and a survey of one tells you nothing reliable about the other.

Industrial buildings and the downtown

Kings Mountain’s textile manufacturing history is well documented, and the downtown has a historical walking tour that traces much of it. Former industrial and commercial buildings are surveyed under the same rules as houses, but the quantities involved are usually larger and the mechanical systems more extensive. Long insulated pipe runs, boiler rooms and large areas of floor tile push a project past state thresholds faster than a residential job of comparable footprint.

The city’s current project pipeline moves through council rather than press release, so if you are working on a municipal or institutional building here, the schedule set in those meetings is what your notification period has to fit inside.

Ten working days, and why a holiday week buys you nothing

North Carolina requires notification ten working days before the scheduled start date under 10A NCAC 41C .0605(b). Most contractors know that. Fewer know how the state defines a working day, and it is genuinely unusual.

The Health Hazards Control Unit counts working days as Monday through Friday, including holidays that fall on any of those days. Holidays count. Thanksgiving Thursday is a working day for the purposes of this clock. So is the Friday after it, and so is Christmas Day if it lands midweek. Contractors who assume the federal holiday calendar pauses the count end up filing late, or worse, planning a start date on the assumption they have bought themselves an extra week.

Read the other direction, this is good news. A late November filing does not stretch into December the way people expect. Two calendar weeks of weekdays is two calendar weeks, whatever else is on the calendar.

When the scope grows halfway through

Older mill village houses have a habit of revealing more once the work starts. A wall opens and there is a second layer of flooring nobody knew about. North Carolina handles this with a revision form, HHCU 3768-R, filed against the existing permit rather than as a new application. Knowing that form exists is the difference between a short amendment and losing the crew for another ten working days.

None of this starts without an inspection carried out by someone the state has accredited to do it. That step is not something an owner can waive, and it is not skipped because a mill village cottage is small.

One agency for a Cleveland County job

Delegated local asbestos programs exist in only three places in this state, and Cleveland County is not one of them. A Kings Mountain project files the state removal permit with the Health Hazards Control Unit and that is the whole filing. Contractors used to working in Charlotte will notice the difference immediately, since Mecklenburg County work requires a second, separate notification to the county’s own air quality office on top of the state permit. Two forms and two fees there, one of each here, with the same ten working day lead time either way.

More detail on how a removal is planned and contained is on our main abatement page. Mill village houses frequently have damp issues alongside everything else, and we also handle mold remediation. The coverage map lists the rest of the region.

For a Kings Mountain building, call 704-393-0303 or send through the address and build year. We work out of 913 E. Catawba St., Belmont, NC 28012.