2026 Volume 5 Issue 1 Pages 101-110
In recent years, a large-scale road sinkhole caused by a sewer pipeline failure occurred in Yashio City, Saitama Prefecture, highlighting the growing importance of preventive maintenance. Meanwhile, the Council for Social Infrastructure and related bodies have advocated “Regional Infrastructure Group Regeneration Strategic Management,” which manages multiple infrastructure assets collectively as an “infrastructure group,” and rational maintenance and management methods to support this approach are considered essential. In this study, we reorganized and synthesized previous cases and, after examining the effects of airtemperature variations and subsurface internal erosion in the ground on sinkhole occurrence associated with sewer pipelines, we newly proposed an equation for estimating the number of sinkholes from the mean air temperature. Furthermore, based on a questionnaire survey of experienced professionals involved in geotechnical engineering and infrastructure asset management, we quantified weighting factors for inspection items and condition ranks, and proposed an evaluation method that contributes to the prevention of sinkholes.
