Raritan Township
Newark Basin shale country. Free referrals to NJDEP-certified radon businesses covering Raritan Township.
Part of Raritan Township, Raritan Township is the largest township by population in Hunterdon County, wrapped completely around Flemington Borough.
Housing stock. Substantial suburban growth from the 1960s onward — ranches, splits and colonials with full basements — sitting alongside farmsteads and crossroads villages that long predate them.
Water supply. The developed corridor and the rural township are not on the same footing. Where an address is on a well, it draws from the Passaic Formation shale — the same fractured rock feeding gas to the slab.
Raritan Township is Newark Basin shale country and it is where most of Hunterdon's post-war suburban housing actually is. That combination is important: full poured basements on graded fill, finished and used as living space, sitting on fractured Passaic Formation shale. It is close to the textbook case for an active sub-slab system, and it is also the case where a finished basement matters — a family room below grade means the reading that counts is taken where people actually spend time, not at the top of the stairs. Away from the developed corridor the township turns rural quickly, and there the wells come back into the picture along with older, less regular foundations.
That is the shape of the ground here, not a finding about any one address. The NJ Geological Survey maps the formations; a certified contractor measures what is actually happening beneath a particular slab.
Around Raritan Township. The requests come from the Copper Hill and Barley Sheaf areas; the Route 31 and Route 202 corridors; the Croton and Reaville crossroads; the Flemington Junction and Case Boulevard area; the streets around Hunterdon Central and the county complex.
Generally good. Subdivision lots have side access and room for exterior pipe runs.
This is the part of the county where an install is most likely to land in the ordinary range: open lots, side access, poured basements, and predictable fill. What raises cost is a finished basement where the pipe has to be boxed in or routed to keep the finish intact, and rural properties where the water side turns out to matter as well.
A very large number of properties with a Flemington mailing address are actually in Raritan Township, which means a different construction office, frequently a private well rather than public water, and usually a much newer foundation than a borough address implies.
Raritan Township holds the county's biggest concentration of post-1960 full-basement housing over Newark Basin shale, which is why the standard sub-slab system is more consistently the right answer here than almost anywhere else in Hunterdon.
Permits run through the Raritan Township construction office, not Flemington Borough's, even for addresses that carry a Flemington postal address — a distinction that catches people out because so much of the township uses Flemington in its mailing address.
New Jersey municipalities sometimes share construction-code services with a neighbour, and postal addresses in this county frequently do not match municipal boundaries, so confirm which office actually has jurisdiction before anyone applies.
What NJDEP has actually measured in Raritan Township
| Test results in NJDEP's dataset | 3,920 |
|---|---|
| At or above 4.0 pCi/L | 1,383 |
| Share at or above the action level | 35% |
| NJDEP tier | Tier 1 — high potential |
Tier 1 means at least 25 homes tested with 25 percent or more at or above 4 pCi/L.
Source: New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Radon Section, 2015 Radon Tier Assignment Report (May 2015). NJDEP's figure is a cumulative count of test results in its dataset, not a count of distinct homes. These are municipality-wide totals and say nothing about any individual property — only a test does that.
Describe the foundation and the reading. We'll match it to businesses certified for exactly that work, at no cost to you.
Get quotes in Raritan Township →Most relevant here
What this bedrock and this housing stock tend to produce.
One or more suction points through the slab, sealed pipe to above the roofline, and a fan outside the living space. The system most Hunterdon houses get.
Sealing the sump and drawing suction through an existing perimeter drain loop. Efficient where the drainage is already there.
A 48-hour closed-house test at the lowest lived-in level, placed and read by a New Jersey certified measurement business. The number everything else follows from.
Gasketed sump lids, sealed floor-wall joints, and closed slab penetrations. Rarely enough alone — but it makes the system that follows work properly.
Nearby
Red shale and mudstone of the Passaic Formation under Flemington and the centre of the county. Fractured rock, plenty of basements, and a mix of public water and wells.
Less common in Raritan Township, but available.