Construction
Roofing and solar panel installation are considered among the highest-risk types of work on construction sites.
In particular, these sectors have a high incidence of falls and have long been identified as a major cause of recurring safety accidents each year. In light of this situation, the specialized construction industry began intensive on-site inspections of roofing and solar panel projects this month, focusing on work environments with a high risk of falls to verify the installation of safety equipment and compliance with work procedures.
In this article, we will summarize the progress of the specialized construction industry’s intensive inspections and highlight one structural challenge that these inspections consistently point to.
The Korea Association of Specialized Construction is conducting intensive inspections of roofing and solar power construction sites this month. Key inspection items include the installation of safety facilities, compliance with work procedures, and fall prevention measures. The intensity of these inspections has been significantly stepped up to reduce the recurring fall accidents that occur every year.
However, voices on-site are also saying, “Inspections alone are not enough to prevent accidents.” This is because most roofing and solar panel construction takes place at small-scale sites, leading to a lack of personnel and systems to consistently manage the results of these inspections.
The significance of these strengthened inspections is clear: the focus of safety management is shifting from a “one-time check” to “sustainable management.”
For work at heights, such as roof work, risks do not disappear with a single inspection. Safety measures must be repeated at every stage of the work, and their implementation must be recorded without omission. Even if safety rules are followed immediately after an inspection, if the process reverts to manual checks and sporadic reporting over time, the effectiveness of the inspection will inevitably be limited to a one-time event.
This reveals a structural challenge: the question of whether records of who took what safety measures and when on the roof are actually maintained at the site.
Roofing and solar panel construction sites often struggle to introduce large-scale equipment and lack the capacity to operate complex systems.
As a result, safety inspection records are frequently scattered across workers’ memories, scattered messenger messages, and paper checklists.
When an accident actually occurs or an unannounced inspection takes place, the decisive factor is not whether “measures were taken,” but whether “we can prove that measures were taken.”
This is where Digitalpresso comes in.
Our comprehensive construction site platform, RenameDP, uses only existing smartphones—without the need for separate, expensive equipment—to automatically map metadata such as location and time when photographing high-risk construction work like roofing and solar panel installation. It organizes this data by category and records site-specific risk assessments and TBMs (pre-work safety meetings) along with electronic signatures.
In other words, the site’s determination that “a safety check was completed before climbing onto the roof” or “fall prevention measures were implemented” is preserved as legal evidence alongside the specific time and location data from that moment. Automated record-keeping can fill that final gap in proving that proper inspections and safety protocols were followed on-site.
If you are managing roof or solar panel construction projects, we encourage you to consider not only establishing effective inspection items but also implementing a system to document that those inspections were actually carried out.
Accidents on rooftops are often not simply a matter of carelessness but stem from a lack of management systems. The intensive inspections in the specialized construction industry are an important effort to close those gaps.
However, as the frequency of inspections increases, the administrative burden on sites is also likely to grow. If these inspections are not one-time events but instead accumulate as data to form a verifiable safety system, roofing and solar construction sites can evolve from “high-risk zones where accidents recur” into safety sites managed by data.
Korea Specialized Construction - “‘Preventing Falls at Roofing and Solar Construction Sites’... Intensive On-Site Inspections This Month”
This content was produced by Digital Presso Co., Ltd. and references the above material. Please refer to the original text for further details.
