Few places in the valley carry as much industrial-era building fabric as Holyoke, where the brick mills of the canal district and the dense tenement rows of the Flats represent some of the oldest housing and commercial stock around. Structures from that period are layered with asbestos in pipe lagging, surfacing material, boiler insulation, and resilient flooring, and decades of additions and repurposing only added more. A former mill that has become offices, studios, or apartments rarely matches its original drawings, so asbestos hides in places no current floor plan would predict. Owners and developers meet it during conversions, system upgrades, and tenant fit-outs, when a wall or a ceiling opens and the work has to pause. The defining condition here is sheer age and scale: the buildings are large, the materials are extensive, and the disturbance potential during renovation is high. That makes thorough testing before demolition essential rather than optional. Confirming what each material contains, and where, lets a complex project move forward in controlled stages instead of stalling. The goal is to define the hazard precisely, contain it, and verify the air before each phase of work resumes. The scale that makes these buildings attractive to developers is the same scale that makes a blind start dangerous, since a single misjudged demolition swing into surfacing material can contaminate an entire floor and the air-handling that serves it, turning a contained line item into a building-wide cleanup.