Radon Mitigation in Salt Lake City, UT

Three Cities in One Housing Stock

Salt Lake City is really three building eras stacked against a mountain front, and they leak soil gas in completely different ways. The Avenues and Capitol Hill run to 1890s brick over rubble sandstone with a dirt cellar underneath. Sugar House, Yalecrest and the streets east of 13th are post-war ranches on full poured basements that somebody finished into bedrooms thirty years later. Downtown and the Granary are slab-on-grade infill from the last decade. One method does not cover all three, which is why the visit happens before the quote.

The Bench Is the Hazard Ground

The Utah Geological Survey puts the highest radon-hazard potential on the east bench and the alluvial fans along the Wasatch front — the old Lake Bonneville shorelines from roughly Federal Heights and Foothill up toward the canyon mouths. The reason is plain once you see a cut bank: clean, coarse, permeable sand and gravel washed down from uranium-bearing rock in the range above. Permeable ground moves soil gas efficiently. It also means a single suction point often develops a pressure field right across a slab, which is the one respect in which the bench is easier to work on than the valley floor.

West of State Street Is a Different Problem

Drop down through Glendale, Poplar Grove and Rose Park and the ground changes to finer lake-bottom silt and clay. Tighter soil is not safer soil — the uranium is still there, having been washed off the same mountains — but it does change the engineering. A fan pulling against dense sediment develops a much smaller pressure field, so the far corner of a basement can sit untreated while the gauge by the pipe reads perfectly. Those are the houses that get a communication test before anyone decides how many holes the job needs.

Cellars Nobody Can Stand Up In

The pre-1910 stock in the Avenues frequently has a partial cellar with a dirt floor and a stone stem wall, and the constraint on that work is headroom rather than technique. Sheeting one properly — membrane across the entire ground surface, seams lapped and sealed, carried up the stone and sealed to it — is slow work in a space you cannot kneel upright in. It takes as long as it takes, and anyone pricing one from photographs has not been down there.

Coverage Across the City

Everything inside the city limits: downtown, the Avenues, Capitol Hill, Sugar House, Glendale and Rose Park, the university area and the foothill streets above it. Nothing here is a trip. As everywhere, the work starts with a 48-hour measurement and finishes with a second one.

Salt Lake City Radon FAQs