Since underground facilities are out of sight, it is difficult to predict accidents, and small-scale sites scattered across the country fall outside the scope of existing regulations. The Korea Agency for Land and Safety Management has identified these two areas—which are the most difficult to address in terms of safety management—as its key priorities for this year. In an interview with The Korea Economic Daily, Director Park Chang-geun, who took office earlier this year, outlined a plan to enhance the effectiveness of underground safety assessments while providing close, hands-on support to small-scale sites rather than relying on enforcement.
In this news report, we will examine the current state of these two blind spots—underground spaces and small-scale construction sites—along with the Agency’s planned countermeasures and the common challenges underlying them.
The Issue of the Effectiveness of Underground Safety Assessments
Small-scale excavation projects in urban areas have long been identified as a major cause of urban sinkholes, as ground surveys and groundwater level monitoring are often carried out merely as a formality. Director Park believes that since a single ground subsidence incident can lead to significant loss of life and property damage, it cannot be prevented by devising countermeasures only after an accident occurs.
Accordingly, the Agency is providing pre-construction consulting for sites subject to underground safety assessments—specifically those with excavation depths of 10 meters or more—and has significantly strengthened guidance and inspections to ensure that monitoring equipment is properly maintained and ground displacement surveys are conducted correctly after construction begins. The Authority is also focusing on enhancing its monitoring system to ensure that data collected on-site does not remain merely on paper but translates into actual safety.
Expanding the Scope of Assessments to Sites Shorter Than 10 Meters
Work to revise the system itself is also underway. While the current Underground Safety Act requires safety assessments only for excavation depths of 10 meters or more or for tunnel construction, the Authority is pushing for systemic improvements to mandate assessments even for sites under 10 meters if there is a risk of accidents. The evaluation criteria will be completely overhauled to focus on three key elements—groundwater, water-stop walls, and ground subsidence—and plans are in place to introduce new hands-on field training courses related to underground safety into the technical training curriculum.
The Reality of Safety Blind Spots
When discussing safety blind spots, small-scale construction sites are the first to come to mind. Since there is no legal obligation to appoint a safety manager and construction periods are often short, these sites frequently lack even basic safety systems. This explains why accidents—such as workers losing their lives while working on rooftops without safety railings or without even wearing hard hats—continue to occur.
The statistics confirm this. Last year, 40 people—20% of all construction accident fatalities—died at small-scale sites with project costs under 500 million won.
Accompaniment and Patrol Consulting Instead of Enforcement
The solution proposed by the agency is hands-on support, exemplified by the “Patrol Consulting” program introduced this year. This is a tailored support program in which experts with extensive experience in construction supervision and site inspections visit sites in person. Rather than relying on one-sided administrative measures—such as covert inspections and the imposition of fines—they identify risk factors one by one and guide immediate improvements. They act as partners, providing necessary advice and training.
Director Park stated, “A single piece of advice that corrects a hazard is a more reliable key to protecting workers’ lives than a single fine,” and announced plans to expand this support to ensure a more comprehensive safety net, especially at small and under-resourced sites.
Expertise is built over time
Faced with the mission of ensuring the safety of national infrastructure, Director Park’s concerns ultimately center on workforce issues. Since expertise in facility safety inspections cannot be acquired overnight, personnel who have spent years on-site accumulating experience and technical skills are absolutely essential.
The Agency is focusing its efforts on strengthening the expertise of its inspection personnel through its five regional headquarters. While increasing the recruitment of local talent, it has reformed its personnel and transfer systems to encourage long-term service at regional headquarters rather than at headquarters. It has also expanded job training to help young employees settle into regional field sites and eliminated any disadvantages regarding promotions.
How to Transfer Know-How
Nevertheless, securing veteran staff remains a challenge. The Agency pairs veterans with new employees during on-site inspections to encourage the natural transfer of know-how, while also promoting collaboration with private specialized firms to accelerate the early adoption of cutting-edge equipment, including AI, in the field.
This is where Digital Presso sees a key point. Although the three challenges covered in the interview may seem like separate issues, digging deeper reveals that they all stem from the same problem. In underground safety assessments, the problem was that site data was preserved only on paper; at small-scale sites, there was no one available to maintain safety records; and regarding workforce issues, veterans’ judgment remained confined to individuals rather than being transferred to the organization. All three cases share the commonality that the decisions made on-site and their rationale are not preserved in a format that can be retrieved and reused.
Digital Presso’s B2B comprehensive construction platform, RenameDP, addresses this problem by starting with the automation of record-keeping. It provides site-specific risk assessments and TBM (pre-work safety briefing) documents, handles electronic signatures directly within the app, and uses AI to automatically generate daily work reports based on uploaded photos and documents. This is because Digital Presso believes that, especially on small sites where it is impossible to assign a dedicated safety manager, a system is needed where records are not a burden but rather a natural byproduct of the work.
Digitalpresso is also finding solutions on the product side to the challenge of knowledge transfer. This approach is exemplified by the drawing-based Copilot, which instantly matches specific locations on a drawing with relevant construction methods, past accident cases, and applicable regulations, as well as the on-site diagnostic Copilot, which analyzes photos, drawing locations, and voice queries together to identify risk factors and areas requiring verification. While the final judgment still rests with on-site experts, the goal is to enable even new hires to instantly access the basis for decisions that veterans have accumulated over many years.
The reason underground spaces and small-scale sites pose challenges is not due to a lack of technology, but because both are out of sight. Underground spaces are physically out of sight, and small-scale sites fall outside the scope of regulatory oversight. The fact that regulators have expanded the scope of evaluation to sites under 10 meters and opted for consulting over enforcement can ultimately be interpreted as an attempt to make these previously invisible areas visible.
In the same vein, documenting on-site judgments and actions as data goes beyond mere regulatory compliance and becomes a matter of safety itself. This is why Digital Presso focuses on the automation of on-site records.
The Korea Economic Daily, “[Power Interview] Underground Spaces and Small-Scale Sites: ‘Safety Achilles’ Heel’… All-Out Management Effort,” 2026 — https://www.dnews.co.kr/uhtml/view.jsp?idxno=202609131600523140794
Interview with Park Chang-geun, Director of the Korea Land and Safety Management Institute (quoted in the article)
Underground Safety Assessment Standards under the Special Act on Underground Safety Management (cited in the article)
This content was produced by Digital Presso Co., Ltd. and references the above materials. Please refer to the original text for further details.
