Site Investigation

Site investigations of varying detail will be required by local planning authorities as supporting evidence for planning applications where land is potentially contaminated. Usually this will take the form of a desktop, or preliminary, study.

Successful planning applications will have conditions attached requiring much more thorough site investigations are carried out where the local authority believes there is a reasonable risk contamination is present in order to establish whether an actionable problem exists, and if so the type, scale and severity of contamination.

This topic describes a site investigation, the process and techniques.