Radon under the company town
Hershey’s housing tells its founding story in rings. The core is the planned company town: solid brick and stone houses from the 1900s through the 1930s, built to Milton Hershey’s standards on streets named for cocoa ports. Around it, the postwar and modern growth that the chocolate plant and then the medical center pulled in, and in the last two decades, dense townhome and apartment construction serving Penn State Health’s constant churn of residents, fellows, and staff.
Underneath all of it runs karst, the cave-forming limestone this corner of Dauphin County is famous for. The same dissolving rock that carved the caverns a few miles away fractures and channels the ground under Derry Township, and fractured limestone hands soil gas a highway system. It’s a core reason the county carries the EPA’s highest radon-potential zoning. The published numbers, from the state program’s ZIP-level data on up, are gathered in radon levels in your area.
The building eras matter because they fail differently. The company-town originals have aged basements. Quality construction for their day, but a century of settlement opens seams, and their coal-to-oil-to-gas utility conversions each left penetrations behind. The townhome stock flips the problem: minimal or no basement, slab-adjacent living, short gas paths from soil to sofa, and party walls that constrain where pipe can run. And Hershey’s rental density, unusual for a town this size thanks to the medical center, means a lot of occupants who’ve never seen their own lease’s basement, let alone a radon report.
No ring of the town is exempt, and none is doomed. Limestone under a house raises the question; only a test in that house answers it.
The Hershey work
Most Hershey calls resolve to radon mitigation shaped to the era of the building: patient retrofit in the company town, compact slab systems in the newer rows. The medical center’s gravitational pull adds a second regular: relocation. Families arriving on residency and fellowship timelines buy and sell on deadlines, which makes transaction-coordinated radon work a fixture here: testing inside inspection windows, mitigation scheduled against closings, paperwork the deal can file.
The townhome rings ask for a lighter touch with the same rigor. Party walls limit where pipe can run, HOA rules sometimes have opinions about exterior penetrations, and small mechanical rooms leave few routing choices. So those assessments are mostly about finding the one clean path from slab to roofline. The company-town houses are the opposite: plenty of routing options, but a hundred years of basement history to read first.
Hershey sits about twenty minutes east of Harrisburg on Route 322, squarely in the everyday coverage zone, so scheduling here is routine, not regional travel. Every job runs the same arc regardless of which ring of town it’s in: assess the foundation, design to it, install, and verify with a retest in writing. The whole approach, service by service, starts at the main page.
Our Services
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Radon Mitigation
A mitigation system collects the gas beneath the home and vents it safely above the roofline — before it can build up indoors.
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Radon Testing
Radon can't be seen or smelled — a test is the only way to know a home's level.
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Radon for Home Sales
Radon findings in a purchase usually come with a deadline attached — the process works better when someone's done it on a closing schedule before.
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Radon Fan Replacement & System Repair
Mitigation fans run continuously for years — and like anything that runs continuously, they eventually wear out.
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Passive Radon System Activation
Many newer homes were built with a passive radon rough-in — a pipe that's ready for a fan but doesn't have one yet.
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Crawlspace Radon Mitigation
Homes over crawlspaces need a different approach — typically a sealed membrane over the exposed soil, tied into the venting system.
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Areas We Serve
- Harrisburg
- Camp Hill
- Mechanicsburg
- Carlisle
- Hershey
- Hummelstown
- Middletown
- New Cumberland
- Enola
- Dillsburg
- Elizabethtown
Find local details for each community on our service-area pages.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do Hershey's newer townhomes need a different system than the old company houses?
Usually, yes. A slab or shallow-foundation townhome typically takes a compact sub-slab system with short routing, while a 1920s company-town house with a full basement is a conventional retrofit with more attention to sealing. Same principle, different anatomy. The assessment sorts out which machine your address needs.
We're renting near the medical center. Whose job is radon?
Testing is something any occupant can raise, but mitigation decisions sit with the property owner. A practical path for renters is to test (kits are inexpensive) and bring an elevated result to the landlord in writing. For owners of rental property, a documented mitigation retest settles the question for every future tenant.
Is there Hershey-specific radon data?
Pennsylvania publishes test results at ZIP-code grain, so Hershey's own testing history is checkable rather than a guess. Dauphin County overall sits in EPA Zone 1, the highest radon-potential designation on the federal map.