The pace of demolition in High River is about to pick up.

Alberta Infrastructure has sent a letter to municipalities affected by the 2013 flood, bringing them up-to-date and outlining the procedures moving forward.

A spokesman for the department, Dallas Huybregts, says there are 49 floodway homes across southern Alberta that need to be demolished.

"There are 16 properties in the M.D. of Foothills that need demolished and one right on the border of the town and M.D. that has a High River address that's going to be included with those, so it'll give us a total of 17 properties," he says.

Huybregts says the tendering process for demolishing all of the buildings in Wallaceville has already started and it closes on Wed. Aug. 26.

"We anticipate in Wallaceville the demolition activities will begin in September and we hope to have all the structures removed by the end of December," Huybregts says. "Filling in basements and removing utilities, work like that, will obviously continue into 2016."

As for Beachwood Estates, he says the homes have been judged appropriate for sale and relocation and the details of that process are still being worked out.

A street in Beachwood Estates

He says issues like asbestos in some of the older buildings needs to be dealt with properly and anything that hopefully can be re-used will be diverted from the landfill.

"That's Government of Alberta policy that whenever we're demolishing a government-owned building or re-building on the site of a former Government of Alberta property is to divert as much from the landfill and recycle as much as we can," he says.

He says they have to look at each property separately for both structural and environmental issues.

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