Over twenty years after the passing of SARA and the Indoor Radon Abatement Act,
public understanding of the gravity of the radon risk remains limited [17,18,19].
Further, the perceived high costs of radon mitigation, and the relative shortage of
certified radon tests and mitigation professionals, impedes the reduction of indoor
radon exposure [20]. Consequently, under the leadership of USEPA, the Federal
Radon Action Plan (FRAP), a collaborative inter-agency program, was initiated in
2011 to unify federal programs, disseminate radon exposure health risk information
to the public, provide professional radon testing and mitigating services, and
promote radon risk reduction through financial incentives and support [21]. Since
the initiation of FRAP, at least 1.6 million homes, schools, and childcare facilities
benefited, and in 12.5% of those units, testing and mitigating were conducted when
necessary as of 2014. However, the data are not available to the public on exactly
how many schools were benefited from FRAP. Because FRAP was phased out in
2015, the National Radon Action Plan (NRAP), led by the American Lung
Association, has assumed several of FRAP’s functions for radon risk reduction,
with the goal of mitigating 5 million ’’high radon’’ homes and saving 3200 lives
from lung cancer annually by 2020 [21]. NRAP however, has no explicit mandate
to mitigate ’’high radon’’ schools. Even the Indoor Radon Abatement Act has not
stipulated an enforceable indoor radon limit for schools but only recommends a
national goal that ’’the air within buildings in the United States should be as free of
radon as the ambient air outside of buildings’’. A nationwide survey of radon levels
in schools estimated that nearly one in five schools in the US has at least one
schoolroom with short-term radon levels above the action level of 4 pCi/L, the level
at which USEPA recommends that schools take mitigation actions [22]. In New
York state, for instance, approximately 90% of the 4290 upstate schools are located
in area designated by USEPA as Zone 1 (4 pCi/L) [13]. Since 1992, the New York
Department of Health has conducted radon concentration measurement in over
12,300 classrooms in 186 schools using short-term detectors. Eighteen schools had
>4 pCi/L of radon in over half of the rooms. About 1150 school rooms, or 9.3% of
those measured, contained from 4 pCi/L to 20 pCi/L of radon, and a smaller number
of school rooms in 19 schools contained up to 80.2 pCi/L of radon [13]. USEPA
estimates that more than 70,000 schoolrooms in use today have high short-term
radon levels [22].
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