***Comment on public involvement in general, "Promises and facts."
Facts. It is a very important professional issue to state as facts only things that you, yourself, know as facts. For example, you could never say, "There has been no hazardous material carried to that dump." Unless you are God or you have personally inspected each load. You could say (if it was true) "It is against the law to carry hazardous material to that dump." Or "The dump has never had a citation from the EPA for …" or " I have worked there for 10 years and we have never discovered any hazardous…." Which are facts you could know.

Promises. "Now a promise made is a debt unpaid…." (Robert Service, the Cremation of Sam McGee.) Never promise something you cannot deliver yourself. If you work for the EPA, don't say, "The sheriff's department will take care of that." Say, "I will ask the Sheriff to…" Don't even say, "The EPA will see to it that…" Say, I will direct my staff to …." Or "The EPA is responsible for that and I will follow up on your request." (You might have the best intentions and the budget might get diverted to some more pressing problem at the last minute. )

***Q The 1996 NRC Risk Assessment "Paradigm" (I assume that's your name for it? Or is Paradigm the official name?) Anyway, is this the preferred method now? In the RODS exercise last week it seemed that the "old" method was the one used in my examples. Perhaps I'm oversimplifying things, but I liked the 1983 process. It seemed very clean, scientific, and logical.
Yes, and so do I. The 1983 process is made for scientist, engineers, and other logical people. In a sense, it denied the inevitable and ongoing interaction of the public and politics in the risk assessment. The 1996 process suggests we put this interaction at the top of the program and emphasizes the interaction with the public and politics. Regarding the adaptation, as a practical matter, most risk assessments are done in a manner suggested or required by law and regulations. However, insofar as you have discretion, you want to bring the public into things sooner rather than later. We resist this, since at the early stages we lack real data and information to give them. Interaction is still possible, we can give the plan about what we will do to gather the data.

**Q. This module was the most interesting module for me, to date. Its funny to know, that engineers who generally deal with generating data and fitting models to existing data, have to go understand public insecurities (justified and unjustified). I know one project, in India, for the manufacture of Sulfuric acid (project running into crores of Rupees (Indian currency)), which went bust, as the MNC that was setting the plant could not convince the residents enough. Not only did the MNC loose out on a great location, but also the residents lost out on the large amount of employment that would have been generated for them. Its funny. Anyways, great module.
A. Yes, I do not believe that engineers are inherently bad at dealing with people, but we do have two problems. One is that we try to apply our analytic skill to people. We don't necessarily do this in our private lives, but when we are presented a situation at work, where there is a "problem with people," we do try to be analytic and are often dismayed with people do not agree with our logical analysis. The other reason is that engineers are often promoted to management based on analytic skills, while management takes more and more "people skills."

*Q. I feel like you should not have to be told to be compassionate and understanding of people who are located near potentially hazardous and toxic areas.
A. True. But the evaluation of "hazardous" and "toxic" are highly subjective. Although in a better world it would not be, how far I live from the site has a lot to do with how I relate to the people who do live near it.