B
In the long-term, Berndt said radon is responsible
for about 600 lung cancer deaths in Michigan per
year. A high presence of radon, combined with
smoking, greatly increases the chance that a
person will develop lung cancer, but about four
out of 1,000 non-smokers develop lung cancer
when exposed to radon at or above the EPA's
recommended action level for radon gas.
Radon gas is measured in units called picoCuries – named after Pierre and
Marie Curie – and represent the amount of radioactivity present. The EPA's
safety limit for radon is set at four picoCuries per liter of air, or four pCi/L.
Statewide, about 26 percent of radon tests have results above four pCi/L,
according to Air Check, which has collected results from more than four
million radon test kits across the country. In Oakland County, the average
amount of radon in buildings is 3.6 pCi/L, with about 27.8 percent of tests
collected by Air Check testing above four pCi/L, and about 51.1 percent
tested above two pCi/L.
"There's no safe level of radon," Berndt said, "but we won't get to a 'zero'
level either. We want to reduce it as much as possible."
Berndt said that because neither the state nor the federal government
require radon testing in schools, there is no central repository for test
results from schools that test voluntarily.
Results provided to Downtown from districts that maintain radon testing
results show few, if any, school facilities tested exhibiting high levels of
radon. In some cases, initial test results showed radon levels at or near the
EPA's level of concern. In each of those cases, follow-up tests were
conducted that showed levels below the EPA's guidelines. With the
exception of a handful of districts in the county, few are testing for radon
as recommended by federal regulators.
"We don't do a ton of radon testing in the schools," said Phil Grosse, an
industrial hygiene consultant with Arch Environmental Group, which has
provided testing for many districts in southeast Michigan. "It's not EPA
mandated, so as a rule of thumb, we don't do a lot of it. When we do, it's
kind of different for each client. If we had our druthers, we would prefer to
do testing for a whole building, but we usually end up doing suspect areas.
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