Risk assessment and occupational safety and health protection in construction work on brownfields

Working on brownfields, the workers, who have to carry out these jobs, may be exposed to hazardous substances (chemicals and/or micro-organisms). This paper proposes a method of risk assessment and specification of measures for occupational safety and health protection, consisting of two steps: danger analysis and exposure assessment. Danger analysis means the investigation of the hazardous substances, of their physical, chemical and hazardous properties and the states of matter, being responsible for their mobility and emission behaviour. Exposure assessment starts with the so-called "working area analysis" - the investigation of the jobs that have to be carried out and of the working area conditions, which have a serious influence on the chance and level of exposure. Taking into account the possible absorption routes and limiting values used in occupational safety and health protection, the combination of the danger analysis data with the results of the exposure assessment leads to the risk assessment, the assessment of the possible health risk, and finally to the specification of safety measures. Risk assessment saves money: the less you know about the hazardous properties of a contaminated site, the higher the level of safety measures has to be, and the higher the costs of safety and health protection become.