Due to focusing on speedy and quantitative development style, it resulted in many constructions that didn't follow regulations in Korea. This is the main reason why Korea enacted the special law on the safety management of large public facilities in 1995. “The special law” has contributed to enforcing proper maintenance on facilities in Korea for about 20 years. However, it is a fact that the safety inspection·diagnosis task which is the minimum standards set by the legal guidelines is commonly overlooked because of low-priced contracts by the management subject. Therefore, in order to find out the realistic minimum legal standards and the actual condition of the inspection·diagnosis evaluation, we investigated and analyzed documentary surveys, research on the actual condition of the field inspection and the result reports of “the special law”
1. Documents survey
We summarized the legal standards of “the special law” by type, subject, inspection cycle, process and evaluation items after analyzing documentary surveys.
2. Analysis of result reports
Reports show that they continuously investigate and evaluate the same floors, the inspection items and the floors are arbitrarily selected by the inspectors. In addition, there were buildings that did not comply with the guidelines despite the fact that more than two types of members have to be investigated and evaluated.
3. Expert Survey
After analyzing the Reports, we asked the cause of problems to consulting exports on the report analysis results. According to the experts' opinions, there is a need to investigate floors and members more than legal standard in order to evaluate the safety of the buildings. As another opinion from the experts is that most of the experts says that it doesn't affect to the result of the building safety evaluation as much as we thought when the same or different floors are evaluated over again. However, they voiced that the number of inspection items, floors and members could affect safety grades and scores.
In addition, their opinion is that when the result is same as the previous investigation, describing only the result and the number of members and floors are very few, could result in an incorrect final report of the building safety evaluation.
After reviewing and analyzing the result reports and the inspection expert survey, we found that that those legal standards are not complied properly and the qualifications of inspectors can cause difference on the comprehensive building evaluation. The absence of the legal guidelines that are taking the difficulties into the consideration and supervision on field investigation can lower the reliability of comprehensive building evaluation.
Therefore, it seems necessary to improve and revise the current legal standards and guidelines of “The special law” and utilize it as an absolute guideline for other countries and Korea which will allow them to discover unexpected deterioration in early stage. Additionally, nationwide disaster management needs to be enforced on cumulative damage to the structural function of buildings which are caused by natural disasters such as, low magnitude earthquakes.
