Introduction to Contaminated Site Management - Dealing with Contaminated Sites: From Theory Towards Practical Application - page 62

Fig. 1.10 An aerial view of the San Francisco Bay area, with a Brownfield in the foreground
(photo: San Francisco Bay regional water quality control board; reproduced with permission)
in REVIT ( 2008 ). A detailed account of the management of Brownfield sites is
given in Nathanail ( Chapter 20 of this topic).
1.7.15 Risk Perception and Risk Communication
Risk Assessment and certainly Risk Management interacts with the daily life of the
general public. The life of individuals who do not have knowledge of the effects of
contaminants or of the fate and transport processes in soil are affected by contami-
nated sites, when they live or work on it or are in any other way associated to this
site. There have been many cases in which contaminated sites raised enormous con-
cern in the society. See Fig. 1.11 , for example, which shows a notice board at which
a connection between a landfill and an increased risk for cancer is presumed, in the
Silvermines area in Ireland, in 2002. The general public has a much more intuitive
approach towards contaminated sites than the experts have. Grasmuck and Scholz
( 2005 ) found that humans with higher scores in self-estimated knowledge tended to
provide lower risk judgments, were less interested in further information, showed
low emotional concern, and thus displayed higher risk acceptance.
The intuitive approach under laymen led to the consequence that the soil com-
partment does not really have a good reputation. For the general public, soil is a
dark place, where some obscure organisms live (if any) and lugubrious decomposi-
tion processes take place. You cannot see what is happening in soils ('and maybe
that is just as well'). A much more sophisticated view on soils relates to the soil as