Larry Koughan, Dwayne Timmons, and Brian Fraser of ALL-TECH Environmental Services have spent a combined 68 years assessing buildings across Atlantic Canada. Their message to contractors is straightforward — and expensive to ignore: skipping environmental assessment on a retrofit doesn't save you money. It multiplies what you spend.
Picture a hotel bathroom renovation. Modest scope. Reasonable budget. Work starts, someone opens a wall, and then another wall. Asbestos-containing materials turn up in the first room. Then mould. Then more asbestos in the next room, and the next. What started as a bathroom refresh becomes a multi-year, multi-million-dollar rebuild — room by room, floor by floor — with the owner watching costs compound in real time.
That story, recounted on Episode 41 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast, is not an edge case. It's what happens when environmental assessment gets skipped. As Koughan, Timmons, and Fraser explain across 53 minutes, the dollars lost aren't just in the remediation — they're in the change-order spiral, the blown schedule, and the contractors who priced a job without knowing what was inside the walls.
ALL-TECH Environmental Services was founded approximately 30 years ago, built around a straightforward principle: be reachable, help the client, take the phone call. The firm now covers all four Atlantic provinces, with branches in PEI (Koughan, 28 years), Cape Breton (Timmons, 11 years), and New Brunswick (Fraser, 29 years). They are consultants — assessment, testing, management, training — not abatement contractors.
Assume asbestos. Verify everything else.
The most reliable rule in pre-renovation planning costs nothing to apply: if the building went up between 1930 and the mid-to-late 1980s, treat asbestos as a baseline, not a question. Koughan's phrasing is blunt: "if there's a building or home built between 1930 and 19 85 mid 80s to late 80s you're going to it's almost guaranteed there's going to be asbestos in it".
Asbestos used in that era shows up in floor tiles, pipe insulation, ceiling texture, roofing materials, and sprayed fireproofing — the latter being the material ALL-TECH managed through a three-year remediation at Halifax Stanfield International Airport. The breadth of the problem is the point: no single material, no single location.
The same logic extends to other hazardous materials the trio covers in detail. PCBs turn up in lamp ballasts and oil-filled electrical transformers — equipment that looks unremarkable until someone cuts into it. Lead paint is common in pre-1980s buildings. Hexavalent chromium comes off stainless steel when it's welded or ground. None of these are unusual finds in Atlantic Canada's older commercial and institutional stock.
Critically — and this is the practical principle behind ALL-TECH's whole practice — the danger is in the disturbance. Asbestos sitting intact in pipe insulation poses no immediate risk. "it's not until you begin disturbing them cutting grinding creating a dust where it becomes the true Hazard". Contractors who understand that threshold make better decisions: they don't shut down a whole building over intact floor tiles, and they don't sand down a ceiling texture without sampling first.
What wet-cutting tells you about silica rules
Crystalline silica is the other hazard that comes up repeatedly. When concrete or masonry is cut or ground dry, silica dust becomes respirable. The control is straightforward and increasingly mandatory: cut wet. "that's why you see a lot of cutting being done wet Cuts so you get a slurry if you do dry on it or grind it somehow you're running into some issues".
Labour regulations across Atlantic Canada are converging on the same silica handling requirements as Nova Scotia. Wet-cutting isn't a preference; it's heading toward standard practice across the region. Contractors who haven't updated their site protocols should.
The same disciplined approach applies to worker exposure monitoring. ALL-TECH runs industrial hygiene sampling: breathing-zone pumps on workers during welding, stainless steel grinding, or chemical processes to measure actual contaminant exposure. "we do actually personal sampling on the workers book sampling pumps on we'll check for hazardous contaminants coming off the process". This is an employer obligation that, in Timmons's and Fraser's experience, often gets attention only after a complaint or inspection forces it.
Radon: the hazard that doesn't show on a visual inspection
Radon is a product of uranium decay in soil and rock. It enters buildings through basement cracks and other openings in the building envelope, and accumulates in lower floors. Health Canada has established it as the second leading cause of lung cancer in Canada — a fact the team notes that many people in the trades haven't internalized.
For Atlantic Canada contractors, the implication is practical: tighter building envelopes are directly relevant to radon control. The same airtightness work that improves energy performance reduces radon ingress. Radon-resistant construction details — sub-slab depressurization provisions, sealed penetrations — should be standard practice on new builds, not an optional upgrade.
Testing is straightforward. ALL-TECH deploys long-term passive monitors for residential, and active electronic monitors for commercial applications. The issue isn't complicated detection; it's contractors and building owners not asking for the test.
Front-loading saves the schedule — and the budget
The Halifax hotel story illustrates the failure mode. The fix is what ALL-TECH proposes to architects and general contractors at the start of a retrofit: bring in the environmental consultant before design is locked, sample all materials systematically, and issue a complete hazmat report that becomes part of the bid package.
The effect on tendering is direct. With a complete assessment in the documents, contractors are pricing known scope. "everybody's comparing apples with apples it's not like because if you don't provide that information sometimes you'll see these really crazy numbers". Without it, one contractor prices contingency high, another prices it low, and the spread in bids is driven by unknown risk, not actual differences in capacity. The owner gets unreliable numbers and a budget built on assumptions.
Skipping that upstream step has a documented cost multiplier. "the owner ends up spending a lot more three times as much four times as much money the contrary takes another year". Three to four times the original scope, plus a year of added schedule. That's the real price of the shortcut.
For GCs who hit unexpected materials mid-project — during excavation or a renovation that opens something unexpected — the response depends entirely on whether a relationship exists. "they'll stop what they're doing give us a call we'll go in and do some testing right for them give them an in-depth report". A same-day call to a consultant you already know turns a potential project stop into a rapid assessment. A cold call into a firm you've never worked with takes longer.
Lenders are now requiring the paperwork
Phase 1, 2, and 3 environmental site assessments have been standard practice for industrial and large commercial transactions for years. Phase 1 is a historical review and site visit — no sampling. Phase 2 confirms contamination through soil or groundwater sampling. Phase 3 delineates the full scope for remediation. What's changed is who's requiring them.
"Banks and financial institutions starting to push that as well because that's a big liability on their end". Lenders learned, sometimes through costly experience, that financing a property acquisition without understanding the site's environmental history transfers contamination liability onto the balance sheet. The pressure is now filtering down into transactions that wouldn't historically have triggered an assessment request — smaller commercial acquisitions, redevelopment sites, properties adjacent to former industrial uses.
For developers and GCs involved in property transactions, building Phase 1 assessment costs into the due diligence budget is no longer optional if bank financing is involved. It's a condition of the deal.
Notable work: from Sydney Tar Ponds to the Irving Whale
ALL-TECH's project history anchors what the team describes in the abstract. During the Halifax Airport asbestos remediation, the firm managed SFRM (sprayed fire-resistive material) removal across a working airport complex over three years. On the Sydney Tar Ponds and Coke Ovens Sites Remediation — the federal-provincial cleanup of approximately 750,000 tonnes of coal-tar contaminants in Sydney, Nova Scotia — ALL-TECH provided perimeter air monitoring for fugitive emissions throughout the multi-contractor cleanup. The Irving Whale salvage brought ALL-TECH to Halifax Harbour for the post-recovery phase, managing asbestos removal from the barge's interior after it was raised from the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
These aren't brand-name drops. They're the proof of scope: the same firm advising a homeowner about basement radon has run perimeter monitoring on one of the largest environmental remediation projects in Canadian history.
After a hurricane, nothing moves without the documentation
The episode was recorded in early 2023, shortly after post-tropical storm Fiona's impact across Atlantic Canada. The environmental documentation demand that follows major storm events is immediate: insurers and remediation contractors won't begin work without an independent assessment on file. "no one's going to move on anything until you guys show up do your testing have everything documented". Contractors who hadn't worked with an environmental consultant before Fiona were in queue behind those who already had the relationship.
ALL-TECH's 30-year run across four provinces is built on a founding philosophy that still defines the firm: "we were always like a phone call away or down the road we'd always take phone call try to help client get you know situation". Founder Terry Smith's decision to send three field veterans — not management — to represent the company on the podcast reflects the same instinct.
The environmental work these three do is unglamorous. It involves moisture meters and infrared cameras, breathing-zone pumps and Phase 1 desktop reviews. It costs money upfront and requires a line item that isn't in the standard contractor's scope. But the alternative, as the Halifax hotel story demonstrates at full resolution, is a budget that compounds until someone does the assessment anyway — just later, after the damage is done.
Guests: Larry Koughan (Sr. Environmental Consultant, PEI Branch Manager), Dwayne Timmons (Environmental Engineer, Cape Breton), and Brian Fraser (Sr. Environmental Consultant, NB Branch Manager) — all of ALL-TECH Environmental Services Limited. Episode 41 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Also featured: Inflector Environmental Services (hazardous materials abatement contractor), Procore Technologies (construction management software), and Payzant Building Products (Atlantic Canada building materials). Radon lung-cancer statistic: Health Canada. Sydney Tar Ponds remediation: Government of Canada.