Reducing Volume and Strengthening High-Risk Work Management... MOLIT Revises Safety Management Plan Manual

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport announced on the 19th that it has revised the "Construction Project Safety Management Plan Preparation Manual" to reduce administrative burdens at construction sites and strengthen the function of preventing safety accidents.

The construction project safety management plan is an essential plan to ensure safety in construction projects and prevent poor construction. It consists of an overall safety management plan, including the site operation plan, and detailed safety management plans for each type of work.

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Under the Construction Technology Promotion Act, the contractor must establish a safety management plan before starting construction and obtain the client’s approval. However, there have been ongoing concerns at sites that contractors submit voluminous safety management plans just to obtain commencement approval, and that these plans are then managed only in a perfunctory manner on site.

In response, the Ministry has moved to revise the manual and improve the structure and volume of safety management documents so that the system can operate efficiently in the field.

First, the structure has been streamlined. The safety management plan is now divided into a main section, consisting of items such as the site operation plan and emergency response plan, and an appendix section, consisting of items such as design documents and structural calculations, with duplicate or unnecessary content removed. By limiting the maximum length for each item, the Ministry has reduced the safety management plan from an average of more than 4,000 pages to about 500 pages. At construction sites, the main section of up to 80 pages will be primarily used for actual safety management, while design documents and other materials are separated into appendices to be used only when separate review is required.

Safety management plans are reinforced for types of work where accidents are more likely to occur during construction projects. In the case of the pile driver overturning accident that occurred in June last year on the Indeogwon-Dongtan double-track railway project, the Ministry has reflected recurrence-prevention measures and significantly expanded provisions related to pile-driving and pile-extracting equipment, such as requiring the preparation of safe work procedures and checklists for such operations.

The review procedure for safety management plans will also be clarified. The Safety Management Plan Preparation Manual now includes specific criteria for returning plans and for determining them to be inappropriate. When documents that do not need to be prepared are included, when reports are prepared falsely, or when there are serious defects, the plan may receive, respectively, a return decision or an inappropriate decision. To ensure that the revised manual can be used in the field as soon as possible, the Ministry plans to hold monthly briefing sessions starting in March for clients, contractors, and private review institutions.

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