For employers, prime contractors, and industrial operators
Industrial Hygiene Consulting in Calgary & Alberta
Anticipating, recognising, evaluating, and controlling the workplace exposures that make people ill. This is occupational work — it concerns the people who work in a building, not the condition of the building itself.
- Exposure monitoring
- Respirable silica
- Indoor air quality
- Legionella
- Ergonomics
- Turnaround support
How we assess
Every engagement runs the same four steps, whether the question is welding fume in a fabrication shop, respirable silica on a concrete crew, or a solvent process in a plant. The order matters more than the instrumentation: an assessment that starts by taking samples usually ends up with data nobody can act on.
Qualitative assessment
A walkthrough, process review, and hazard characterisation. We map which workers do what, which agents they contact, and how often. This is where most of the analytical value sits, and it determines whether measurement is needed at all — a programme that measures everything is usually a programme that has not thought about anything.
Similar exposure groups
Workers are grouped by the exposures their tasks actually produce rather than by job title. Getting this wrong is the most common flaw in an otherwise competent programme: sampling the wrong grouping produces defensible-looking numbers that describe nobody in particular.
Quantitative measurement
Where the qualitative judgement is close to a limit, or where a regulator or insurer requires evidence, we measure. Personal sampling equipment is worn in the worker's breathing zone across a representative shift and analysed against the applicable occupational exposure limit.
Interpretation and control
Numbers are compared against Alberta's occupational exposure limits and translated into a control hierarchy — elimination and substitution first, engineering controls next, administrative controls and personal protective equipment last. Recommendations are ranked by what will actually reduce exposure, not by what is cheapest to implement.
Occupational exposure monitoring
Personal sampling in the worker's breathing zone, measured against Alberta's occupational exposure limits. This is the core of the practice and the part most often requested by name.
Chemical exposure
Solvents, welding fume, isocyanates, hydrogen sulphide, benzene, and process-specific agents. Sampling media and analytical method are selected per agent, and results are reported against both the eight-hour limit and any short-term or ceiling value that applies.
Dust and respirable crystalline silica
Respirable and inhalable fractions across concrete cutting, grinding, abrasive blasting, and dry sweeping tasks. Silica is the exposure most frequently underestimated on Alberta construction sites, largely because the visible dust and the respirable fraction behave very differently.
Worker exposure sampling is a distinct discipline from building-fabric assessment. If your question is what hazardous materials a building contains rather than what its workers are breathing, that is a designated substance survey.
Indoor air quality & moisture assessment
Diagnostic work for buildings where occupants report symptoms and nobody can say why. This is assessment and root-cause investigation — establishing what is happening and what is driving it.
- Comfort and ventilation parameters: carbon dioxide as a ventilation-adequacy proxy, temperature, relative humidity, and airflow measured against the design intent of the system rather than against a generic target.
- Contaminant screening: volatile organic compounds, carbon monoxide, and particulate, with source identification where a reading is elevated.
- Moisture investigation:thermal imaging, moisture metering, and building envelope review to find where water is entering or condensing. In Calgary's freeze-thaw climate the mechanism is frequently interstitial condensation rather than a visible leak.
- Fungal ecology surveys: surface and air sampling with indoor-to-outdoor comparison, to establish whether an indoor reservoir exists and where it sits.
This service diagnoses; it does not clean. Where an assessment identifies growth requiring remediation, that work is scoped by our remediation team.
Water system safety & Legionella
Legionella colonises building water systems that sit warm and stagnant — cooling towers, hot water storage operating below temperature, decorative fountains, spas, and long dead-leg runs in plumbing. The organisms reach people as aerosol, which is why the exposure risk concentrates around towers, showers, and misting equipment rather than around taps.
Our work covers system risk assessment against the physical layout, sampling from representative outlets and system points, and a written water management plan setting out temperature regimes, flushing schedules, and the monitoring cycle. Buildings returning from partial occupancy or seasonal shutdown carry elevated risk, and that is the point at which a plan is worth having in place rather than being written.
Ergonomic assessment
Musculoskeletal injury accounts for a large share of Alberta lost-time claims, and unlike most occupational exposures it produces no measurable atmospheric concentration to sample. Assessment is observational and task-based: reach, force, posture, repetition, and duration, evaluated against recognised screening tools.
We assess workstations, manual handling tasks, and equipment interfaces, then recommend changes ranked by what will realistically be adopted. An engineering fix that operators quietly work around reduces nothing — so recommendations account for how the task is actually performed rather than how the procedure says it is.
Compliance & documentation
Most employers who call us have some of this already. The gap is usually not the absence of a programme but the absence of evidence that it operates. The table below maps the common drivers to what actually has to exist on paper.
| Driver | Obligation | What we deliver |
|---|---|---|
| Alberta OHS Code, Part 4 | Identify harmful substances, assess worker exposure, and control it below occupational exposure limits | Exposure assessment report and written exposure control plan |
| Alberta OHS Code, Part 18 | Select, fit, and maintain personal protective equipment appropriate to the assessed hazard | PPE selection rationale tied to sampling results; respirator fit-test coordination |
| Alberta OHS Code, Part 35 | Control worker exposure to biological hazards | Biological hazard assessment and response procedure |
| Prime contractor / owner requirements | Demonstrate a functioning hygiene programme during contractor pre-qualification | Programme documentation package and supporting monitoring records |
| Insurer or corporate audit | Evidence that identified exposures are assessed on a defined cycle | Monitoring schedule, trend data, and corrective action tracking |
Turnaround & maintenance support
Scheduled turnarounds concentrate a plant's highest-exposure activity into a compressed window, with an unfamiliar contractor workforce, confined space entries, hot work, and catalyst handling running simultaneously. It is the period when hygiene coverage matters most and is most likely to be thin.
We embed hygiene personnel for the duration — pre-turnaround hazard review and sampling plan, on-shift monitoring aligned to the actual work schedule rather than to office hours, real-time screening where a control decision has to be made immediately, and a close-out report that feeds the next turnaround's planning. Coverage extends across the Alberta industrial corridor as well as the Calgary region.
Related hazard surveys
Two adjacent services come up constantly on hygiene engagements. Both are handled by dedicated teams rather than as part of a hygiene scope:
Where a facility needs its asbestos-containing materials identified, sampled, and monitored during disturbance, that is a dedicated discipline with its own accreditation and reporting requirements. Our Calgary asbestos testing team handles it end to end.
Legacy coatings on structural steel and building envelopes raise a comparable question, with its own sampling methods and clearance criteria. That work sits with our lead paint team.
Frequently asked questions
When does an employer need occupational exposure monitoring?
Whenever a worker may be exposed to a harmful substance and the employer cannot demonstrate that exposure stays below the occupational exposure limit. Alberta's OHS Code, Part 4, frames this as an assessment obligation rather than a testing obligation — monitoring is simply the most defensible way to discharge it.
What is the difference between a qualitative and a quantitative assessment?
A qualitative assessment characterises the hazard through walkthrough, process review, and professional judgement, and establishes whether measurement is warranted. A quantitative assessment measures it — personal sampling against a defined exposure limit. Most programmes start qualitative and escalate only where the judgement is close.
How long does personal sampling take?
Sampling runs across a representative work shift, so a single campaign is typically one to three days on site depending on how many similar exposure groups need coverage. Laboratory turnaround is a further two to five business days.
Can you support a scheduled turnaround?
Yes. Turnaround and shutdown windows compress a year of high-exposure activity into a few weeks, and they are where monitoring coverage most often lapses. We staff to the shift pattern rather than to business hours.
Do you provide the exposure control plan, or just the data?
Both, where that is what the client needs. Sampling data on its own rarely satisfies a regulator or an insurer — the useful deliverable is the assessment, the control plan that follows from it, and the documentation trail that shows the plan is being applied.
Serving Calgary and the Alberta industrial corridor
Build a defensible hygiene programme
Tell us the processes, the workforce, and what is driving the requirement, and we will propose an assessment scope that fits the obligation rather than exceeding it.
24/7 emergency response across Calgary and surrounding communities.