Seoul City will conduct an emergency inspection of large public and private apartment construction sites within the city.
On the 10th, Seoul City announced that, in response to the underground parking lot collapse accident at apartments in Geomdan New Town, Incheon, it will conduct an emergency safety inspection of apartment construction sites applying special structures such as flat slab structures from July 10 to August 9 to prevent similar accidents.
The underground parking lot of the Geomdan New Town apartments, where comprehensive negligence was revealed from the design stage to supervision and construction, was designed with a flat slab structure where columns directly support the slab without beams.
About 10 private apartment construction sites and about 2 construction sites of Seoul Housing and Communities Corporation (SH Corporation) will be inspected by deploying the Seoul City Apartment Quality Inspection Team, and about 5 general building construction sites applying similar special structures will be inspected using the Seoul City Building Safety Advisory Group.
Each site will undergo a three-day inspection focusing on the safety of special structures, including a first phase document review such as design drawings and a second phase on-site inspection. During the on-site inspection, it will be checked whether construction, supervision, and verification are properly carried out according to the design.
In particular, the reinforcement of shear reinforcement bars, which caused the recent collapse accident, will be detected using a rebar detector, and the concrete strength will be confirmed with a concrete strength tester (Schmidt hammer).
The city is currently recording major public construction works worth over 10 billion won on video, and from next year plans to expand video record management to public construction works under 10 billion won and private building construction sites. In March of this year, video record management was made mandatory as a special condition in public construction contracts.
In October last year, the city proposed an amendment to the Building Act to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport to expand photo and video recording to all buildings subject to building permits, and plans to actively promote the legalization of record management to prevent poor construction through close consultation with the Ministry in the future.
However, since it takes time to amend the law, until the amendment is made, the city will promote a plan to photograph and record videos of major construction processes as a condition for building permits to prevent safety accidents and poor construction.
Yoo Chang-soo, Deputy Mayor for Administration 2, said, "To prevent poor construction and ensure safety and quality, we will record and manage all processes of construction sites on video and verify any negligence through analysis of the recorded footage," adding, "We will create a safe city Seoul through emergency quality inspections of private apartment sites and building construction."
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