Union Township radon testing and mitigation

Union Township is a rural township of ridge and valley ground west of Clinton, split by Interstate 78.

Housing stock. Older farmhouses along the original roads with substantial single-family development from the 1980s onward on large lots.

Water supply. Much of the township sits outside a public supply. Where a well serves an address, it draws from whichever of the township's three bedrock settings that lot happens to sit on.

The ground under Union Township

Union Township is the one municipality in Hunterdon County that NJDEP does not classify Tier 1. In the state's 2015 tier report, 364 of the 2,584 test results it holds for the township were at or above the action level — 14 percent, which places Union in Tier 2, moderate potential. Every other municipality in the county is Tier 1, several of them approaching 45 percent. That gap is worth understanding rather than relaxing about. Union covers the ground where the Highlands margin, the carbonate valley and the edge of the shale country all come together, and overburden depth varies a great deal across it — exactly the mixed ground that produces a moderate township average sitting on top of a very wide spread of individual results. Fourteen percent still means roughly one tested property in seven came back at or above 4.0 pCi/L. Newer houses here typically have full poured basements on engineered fill, the easiest case for a sub-slab system; the older farmsteads, with irregular stone foundations and additions on separate footings, are the harder one. Where an address is on a well, the water side comes up as often as it does anywhere in the county.

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 Union Township. The requests come from the Pattenburg and Perryville crossroads; the Route 173 and I-78 corridor; the Jutland area; the Musconetcong Mountain slope on the northern edge; the Spruce Run and Norton Road country.

Working here

Open rural lots with good access on the newer properties; older farmsteads can be tighter and more built-around.

What moves the cost here

Newer houses here typically have full poured basements on engineered fill, which is the easiest case for a sub-slab system and usually responds well to a single properly sited point, so those price close to the textbook install. Where cost rises is on the older farm properties, where sealing an irregular foundation and reaching separate additions can turn a one-point system into a two- or three-point one.

Union Township is the only municipality in Hunterdon County that NJDEP places in Tier 2 rather than Tier 1, which makes it the one address in the county where a homeowner might reasonably assume the risk is somebody else's problem — and the one where that assumption is most worth testing, because a 14 percent township average is an average of a very mixed piece of ground.

The township sits at the meeting point of three different bedrock settings, so depth to rock — the single variable that most affects how far suction travels under a slab — is unusually inconsistent inside one municipality.

Its split between 1980s-onward subdivision housing on engineered fill and much older farmsteads on irregular stone foundations produces two very different jobs under the same town name.

Permits and paperwork

Permits run through the Union Township construction office. One consequence of the Tier 2 designation is worth flagging: New Jersey's Radon Hazard Subcode requires radon-resistant construction in new residential and school buildings in Tier 1 municipalities, so a new build here is not automatically caught by it the way one across the line in Clinton Township would be. Confirm with the construction office rather than assuming either way. Where a property is on a well, a Private Well Testing Act gross alpha result at sale is often the first sign of a water-side radon question as well as an air-side one.

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.