On the 20th, an internal seminar was held at the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency, a specialized organization for workers' compensation, to discuss countermeasures after the fire in the Icheon Hanik Express warehouse. The presenter was Chairman Doo-Yong Park, and the title of the presentation was <How to Prevent the Recurrence of Industrial Safety Accidents at Labor Sites Seen by Fire Participation in Icheon Hanik Express Logistics Warehouse>.
"After the disaster in Icheon, various ministries and agencies are working on various measures to prevent recurrence. (...) There is nothing more to add here, but I think it should be eliminated. Too many problems and too many problems at once With so many countermeasures, it is rather confusing which one is the real problem and which one can be solved. "
In the statement, Park points out that only urethane or sandwich panels and excessive construction to shorten the air should not be pointed out as a problem. The fact is that there cannot be one cause in a disaster, so it is necessary to analyze the causes in a complex way and take fundamental measures. At the same time, what was pointed out as a problem was the preparation of a safety management plan under the Construction Management Technology Act and the review and verification system for a hazardous risk prevention plan under the Industrial Safety and Health Act.
"If there is a problem in our country, there has been an aspect of increasing administrative regulations that only do paper work. In the event of an accident, the regulatory agency tends to create new administrative regulations. As a result, it is also true for stakeholders. Korea's safety regulations tend to have a lot of paperwork under administrative regulations, and many overlap. "
Park's argument is not that the system itself has problems. The only problem is that this system is the only device that regularly checks the safety of construction sites, Mr. Park claims. In addition to the safety management plan and the hazard risk prevention plan, it is diagnosed that it has reached the point where the regulation of documents is excessive and overlapped by stacking only documents such as various educational materials and material safety data sheets.
Indeed, prior to the fire at the Icheon Hanik Express Logistics Warehouse, the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency, chaired by Chairman Park, reviewed and confirmed the Hazardous Hazard Prevention Plan six times. On March 16, just about a month before the accident, I went to the site to check, but before I started working on the fire, I was only concerned that a fire could cause a fire.
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, the director of the field, which is to be strengthened, is declining in weight and ability, Park said. It is that there is no effective supervision, which is an effective field inspection method. In order to solve the safety problem, it is pointed out that it is necessary to check and supervise the site directly, not to simply review and confirm the plan, and to point out that reviewing and checking the plan should not be mistaken for site verification. It seems to be trying.
Even in the case of emergency inspections at the construction site of the distribution warehouses of each local government that took place after the tragedy, there is no temporary inspection. It is a situation in which distribution of press releases in advance allows the inspection target to know the fact of inspection in advance, and even before the interview with the media, it is a situation where the visit is made the day before. As a result, even on the day of the inspection, even the public relations team of the contractor is on the site, and there are many cases where briefing materials for local officials and experts who came out for inspection are also prepared in advance.
The reason why the field inspection is not carried out properly and only the document inspection is strengthened is because Park's interests have been disaggregated. As a business owner, it is naturally better to regulate documents than an on-site inspection. In the case of a supervisory authority, it is possible to work with administrative regulations that do not have to be sent to the prosecution in case of document regulation violations. For this reason, it is pointed out that the preference for document regulation is not improving.
"Almost the only way to ensure the on-site operability of safety regulations is industrial safety supervision. The quantity and quality of industrial safety supervision (tubes) is proportional to the country's level of industrial safety."
Naturally, the countermeasure proposed by President Park in the statement is to strengthen the on-site inspection. In particular, he insists that the number of professional occupational safety inspectors that are significantly insufficient should be increased. According to President Park's understanding, there are currently about 700 occupational safety inspectors in Korea. According to Mr. Park, it is necessary to manage around 3,500 locations per supervisor to manage 2.5 million locations nationwide. Is to increase from this number. It also emphasizes that a special judicial police officer with expertise should be appointed to the occupational safety inspector, so that on-site regulation can be achieved.
In addition to this pre-regulatory perspective, Park also points to post-punishment. Mr. Park analyzes that in Korea, the current punishment for serious disasters is weak, and even the weak punishment applies only to sub-managers such as the field manager, not the chief executive officer. Companies that are corporations are also faced with responsibility. In the end, I believe that the situation of inconsistency between the person being punished and the person responsible is being reinforced. President Park explains that this should eventually be resolved through legislative activities such as the Major Disaster Company Punishment Act.
Doo-Yong Park, Chairman of the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency, may not differ significantly from what has been pointed out. However, despite making it clear that it was a personal identification, it would have some significance as it was expressed by the head of the agency that directly undertakes the current industrial accident prevention activities as pointed out by President Park. As President Park will attend the legislative body (the National Assembly), which has been identified as the place to solve the problem in the presentation, as the head of the audited body, I hope that it will lead to a substantial contribution to solving the problem.