A couple of weeks ago, two separate and distinct people—both rational, intelligent professional folks—told me they knew how to get radon gas out of a house. All you have to do, they said, is take a leaf blower into the crawl space, fire it up, and stick it into the ground. It’ll blow all the radon out of the soil, and it won’t come back for years and years. Both of these folks attributed this ingenious cure to an unnamed chemist.
Please, all of you, take your leaf blowers into the crawl space and stick ’em in the dirt. Those of you who live in condos and apartments, blow out your radon too. Instruct your groundskeepers to stick the business ends of their leaf blowers and weed whackers in the ground (for the stirring effect) and max ’em out. If Mr. Chemist is right, it’ll be a joyful day. We’ll chase all the radon back up to Pennsylvania, where it came from. And, as an extra added bonus, the motors on all these un-neighborly, loud-as-Grand-Funk-feedback yard care devices will burn up, making the world a little quieter, at least until Home Depot can restock.
I’m all for it. Repeat as necessary.
Just in case this doesn’t work, though, here’s some stuff you ought to know about radon:
Radon is radioactive gas. If you breathe in enough of the stuff, jumpy little subatomic particles will bang into the cells of your lungs and mess them up. Lung cancer is not out of the question. Pooh-pooh this if you want to, call it one more goofy scare trumped up by the government and their willing media thralls. But your opinion will be in direct conflict with those of the American Medical Association, the American Cancer Society, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Centers for Disease Control.
Middle Tennessee is a high-risk radon region. Millions of years ago, the ancient sea left us with limestone bedrock, which is laced with uranium, which emits radon gas. The gas finds its way to the surface, and it can come out in your house. Estimates (who knows how they made ’em) say that one in three local houses could have high radon. My company has been testing for radon for almost two years, and somewhere between a third and a quarter of the houses we’ve tested had high radon.
Radon readings at your neighbors’ houses—whether they be high or low—don’t mean diddly at your house. The whole radon scare started when a worker at a Pennsylvania nuke plant started setting off alarms when he showed up for work. After ruling out contamination at the plant, radiation hunters checked the guy’s house, where they measured 2,400 picocuries per liter of pure radon, which is 600 times the government “action level” of 4 picocuries per liter. Naturally, the nuke hunters checked nearby houses. The neighbors were clean.
As far as radon contamination is concerned, the mode of construction of your house—basement or crawl space or slab—means nothing. The age of your house means nothing. Neither does the size, the cost, or the upstanding character of the builder. Either you’ve got radon or you don’t. The only way to find out is to have your house tested.
If you have your house tested, don’t get a canister test. Can tests, as we call ’em in the biz, are lame and unreliable. If a can test says you have high radon, the EPA recommends a second test, which doubles your cost and worry time. Get a continuous monitor test for at least 48 hours. If the continuous monitor test says you have high radon, you don’t need to retest. Get an EPA-certified Radon Measurement Proficient (RMP) contractor to do the job. Avoid part-time, semi-employed, sitting-by-the-phone-watching-The-Price-Is-Right types, especially if they do radon mitigation work.
If you’re buying a house, it’s smart to have it tested for radon, even if you are thoroughly convinced that the stuff is not only harmless, but actually good for you. Why? Well, someday, you’ll sell the place, and there’s a good chance that prospective buyers will choose to believe the AMA, ACS, EPA and CDC instead of you. If your buyers test, and the test comes out high, you’ll be stuck with the bill for the mitigation work and the knowledge that you’ve been sucking down radon since the day you moved into the house.
Walter Jowers can be reached at Walter.Jowers@nashville.com.
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