[Anchor]
This Chuseok holiday is relatively short, so highway congestion is expected to be even worse. Drivers need to exercise extra caution when driving inside tunnels, where risks are high. Although there are more than 6,000 CCTVs installed inside tunnels, it was found that it took the Korea Expressway Corporation nearly four minutes to realize an accident had occurred.
This is a report exclusive by reporter Je Hui-won.
[Reporter]
A passenger car driving through a tunnel overtakes a truck, crashes into the median barrier, flips over, and bursts into flames.
The driver of the passenger car died in this accident, which occurred at around 1:11 AM on July 9 at the Baekjeon Tunnel on the Gwangju-Daegu Expressway.
Although the accident was captured clearly on the tunnel's internal CCTV, the Korea Expressway Corporation only began follow-up measures, such as preventing secondary accidents, 13 minutes later after receiving notification from the police.
The Korea Expressway Corporation explained that video footage from that specific location had stopped displaying due to aging equipment.
To monitor accidents inside tunnels that can easily lead to massive casualties, about 6,200 of the roughly 9,000 expressway CCTVs nationwide are located inside tunnels. However, the Korea Expressway Corporation recognized less than half of the accidents through CCTV.
An analysis of 58 tunnel fatal accidents over the past five years showed that it took the Korea Expressway Corporation an average of 3 minutes and 54 seconds to notice them, which is twice as slow as the overall accident average.
Nearly half of the accidents were recognized only after 5 minutes had passed, and there were even 5 cases where it took 10 minutes or more.
This is a control center monitoring expressway CCTVs.
On average, a single employee monitors about 52 CCTVs during the day and 77 at night.
While there are automatic detection CCTVs that automatically sense and alert sudden situations like stopped vehicles or driving in the wrong direction, there are quite a few instances where responses are initiated only after receiving police notification or eyewitness reports even after an automatic alarm sounds.
[Hwang Hee / Member of the National Assembly's Land, Infrastructure and Transport Committee (Democratic Party of Korea): (Tunnels) have a high possibility of leading to secondary or tertiary accidents and multiple-vehicle collisions. Therefore, I believe that establishing a technological system that does not miss the golden time is urgently needed.]
The Korea Expressway Corporation stated that it will apply AI technology to about 4,000 CCTVs by the end of this year to more quickly detect unexpected situations such as accidents inside tunnels.
(Video by Bae Moon-san | Video Editing by Lee So-young | Graphics by Jang Seong-beom and Jeon Yu-geun)
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