A Case Analysis of the Economic Impact on Accidents during Excavation

터파기 공사 사고의 경제적 영향 사례분석

As the land price in the downtown area increases, buildings are becoming bigger, deeper and higher. Consequently, the importance of underground construction has increased. Although construction engineers make every effort to complete underground construction without any problem, construction failures like landslides and the collapse of a retaining wall occur because of the uncertainty of the soil conditions as well as the unexpected risks of excavation work. In order to prevent potential excavation accidents, it is essential to understand the causes and impacts of such accidents. However, there are only a few examples of construction failures, which show the economic impact on accidents during excavation because of the sensibility of the information. This paper presents two cases of excavation accidents, which were investigated by construction insurance company. The compensation for the accidents paid by the insurance company was compared with the estimated costs calculated based on the estimation method for excavation accidents proposed by our previous study. The comparison results showed that the estimate calculated by our method was much less than the actual compensation because the estimate solely focused on the construction costs whereas the compensation included other external factors.