Matthews, NC Asbestos Inspection and Abatement

Matthews is an early-1980s suburb and the numbers state it plainly. Of roughly 12,588 housing units, the largest single decade is the 1980s at 2,911 units, 23.1 percent of the town. The median build year is 1994. Stock finished before 1980 comes to 2,275 units, 18.1 percent, and 1,315 of those were built between 1970 and 1979. That 1970s cohort is the practical target for asbestos work in Matthews, and it is a real count rather than a marketing generality about old houses.

A house completed in 1976 is a 1976 house whether it stands in a mill town or on a Matthews street lined with 1988 construction. Resilient floor tile and the mastic under it, textured ceiling finishes, duct wrap, pipe insulation and roofing products from that period are all worth testing before anyone opens a wall. None of it can be identified by eye. A North Carolina accredited asbestos inspector has to survey the building before demolition or renovation, and nothing about a newer surrounding neighborhood waives that.

Ten contributing buildings, and pressure on all of them

The Matthews Commercial Historic District was listed on the National Register on August 22, 1996 and holds just ten contributing buildings dating from 1888 to 1939. Heath and Reid General Store from 1888, the Funderburk Brothers complex from the 1890s, Renfrow Hardware from about 1900, and the 1939 US Post Office are the named anchors. There is no mill and no industrial building in it. Local coverage has characterized Matthews as becoming the South End of the suburbs, and that redevelopment pressure is now arriving at a downtown whose oldest fabric is only ten buildings deep. Ten buildings is a small margin for error on a survey.

The schedule problem, for general contractors

If you run construction schedules rather than own the building, this is the section that matters. A Matthews job needs two notifications rather than one, and they run against the same clock.

Mecklenburg County Air Quality operates a delegated local asbestos NESHAP program, one of only three in North Carolina. So you file a NESHAP Notification of Demolition and/or Renovation with MCAQ and, in parallel, a removal permit application with the NC DHHS Health Hazards Control Unit. Union County, whose line sits close to Matthews, has no local program: state filing only. If your last three jobs were in Indian Trail or Monroe you have been running a one-agency process, and Matthews is a two-agency one. Nothing about that is optional and neither agency accepts the other’s form.

Lead time is 10 working days before the scheduled start date. The trap sits in the definition. The Health Hazards Control Unit counts working days as Monday through Friday, including holidays that fall on any of those days. Most schedulers assume holidays are excluded and pad accordingly. Here a Monday holiday still burns a working day, so a submittal timed on the assumption that it does not lands late instead of early. Count ten weekday boxes on the calendar and nothing else.

Two definitions determine how much paperwork you owe. Demolition means the wrecking or taking out of any load-supporting structural member. Remove no load-bearing member and the job is a renovation no matter how much material leaves the site, which changes the form and the survey scope. Separately, demolition notification on form DHHS-3768 is required whether or not asbestos is present, so a clean survey does not delete the filing from your critical path. Once scope shifts after submittal, which 1970s interiors reliably arrange, revision form HHCU 3768-R keeps the existing application alive instead of restarting the clock on a new one. Where a true emergency exists, the 10-day requirement is waived with notification no later than the following working day, and the same relief applies where a government agency has ordered a demolition on grounds of structural unsoundness.

Take the quantities off the drawings as three columns and keep them apart: 260 linear feet, 160 square feet, 35 cubic feet. Exceeding any one of them is enough on its own, and they are never combined into a single figure. A job beneath all three still needs the pre-work survey and, if it is a demolition, still needs the notification.

One more line for schedulers working residential product. If the structure is a residential building with four or fewer dwelling units, the federal facility definition excludes it and the MCAQ notification comes off your critical path. That does not take the state permit off with it. Removing one agency does not remove the ten working days, and a townhome cluster built as separate four-unit buildings is a different analysis from a single twelve-unit building on one footprint. Our outline of abatement scoping and permitting covers how we sequence that against a construction program.

Matthews is on the eastern side of the territory we cover, and much of the 1970s stock we handle sits just across the line, as our Charlotte service page explains.

To get a Matthews project surveyed and both filings started, call 704-393-0303 or send through the schedule and scope. We are based at 913 E. Catawba St., Belmont, NC 28012.