From The Dalles Chronicle
My husband and I recently purchased our first home. As part of the home inspection process, I requested a radon test. I learned about the risks of radon in an environmental health class I took at Oregon State University and wanted to make sure I knew everything about our new home—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
B&B Home Inspections, LLC performed the test and set up two machines in our home, one in the basement, the other in a bedroom that sits over a crawlspace. After a 48 hour test period, we had two bar graph readouts of the radon levels in each of the rooms — both showed higher than safe levels.
Radon enters the home through a number of places: cracks in concrete slabs, spaces behind brick walls, pores and cracks in concrete blocks, floor-wall joints, exposed soil, weeping tile, mortar joints, loose-fitting pipe penetrations, building materials such as some rocks, and water from some wells. Parts of Oregon have particularly high radon levels because of our geologic history of glacial melt from the ancient Missoula floods.
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