The perils of risk communication in a context of uncertainty: the long dispute over contamination after the Grenfell Tower fire

Disasters, in disrupting societies' normal coping capacities, produce uncertainties about secondary risks and authorities' capacities to protect communities. While post-disaster risk communication treats risks as known, manageable and explainable to the public, we argue for greater attention to genuine uncertainty post-disaster. We present a case study of the long dispute over the potential health-damaging contamination of air and soil after the Grenfell Tower fire in London, UK, drawing on ethnography and document analysis. Although standard public health assessments and risk communication indicated no elevated risks, community concerns persisted. We ask: Why did authorities' communications of safety of air and soil after the Grenfell Tower fire fail to reassure the affected community? Our answer centres on authorities' lack of engagement with scientific uncertainty. Residents were confronted with contradictory conclusions from different ‘regimes of perceptibility’, which produced genuine ambiguity about the reality of harm. Despite this uncertainty and the community's embodied experience of harm, authorities' communications of safety and justifications of inaction repetitively referred to generic advice, insufficient science, normal measurement thresholds and legal duties, appearing unresponsive and dismissive. In conclusion, we call for greater openness to an uncertainty (rather than risk) framing in postdisaster management. Making uncertainty actionable requires ‘technologies of humility’, which can support: (1) acknowledging uncertainty, (2) facilitating deliberative multi-stakeholder risk assessments and (3) implementing the precautionary principle. These practices of recovery aim, more generally, to build community-authority trust and shared problem-solving in the immediate term, and a stronger long-term democratic foundation for responding to the next disruption.