Response and Recovery in the Remediation of Contaminated Land in Eastern Germany

There are as many as 500,000 contaminated sites in Europe, some 20,000 of which can be classified as so-called megasites due to the complexity of soil and groundwater contamination found on them. Megasites pose a range of tricky technical and management challenges with regard to risk and re-use. Situations involving a lack of economic incentives, ongoing health threats, and often unknown chemicals shifting beneath the surface prompt us to refer to such contaminated sites as slow, or creeping, disasters. ¹ However, as Uriel Rosenthal (1998, p153) has nicely phrased it, ‘creeping disasters can, of course, burst into the open at a specific site, on a specific moment’. The present chapter highlights certain strategies applied to such sudden bursts of contaminants during the process of recovery of a complexly contaminated site located in the former East Germany. These strategies were related to having to cope continuously with ignorance regarding multiple contaminant sources and plumes from previous industrial activities. Any analysis of these processes of dealing with the unknown, we contend, demands clear recognition of and communication about the limits of knowing. This can be seen as an important and yet so far unexplored variable in remediation processes on contaminated land per se.