[Anchor]

The number of fatalities from highway tunnel accidents this year has more than tripled compared to the same period last year. According to our reporting, although there are over 6,000 CCTVs inside tunnels nationwide, it takes the Korea Expressway Corporation an average of nearly four minutes just to realize that a tunnel fatality has occurred.

Here is the report by Je Hui-won.

[Reporter]

A passenger car driving through a tunnel overtakes a truck, crashes into the median barrier, flips over, and is engulfed in flames.

The driver of the passenger car died in this accident, which occurred at around 1:11 a.m. on July 9 at the Baekjeon Tunnel on the Gwangju-Daegu Expressway.

Although the accident scene was fully captured by the CCTV inside the tunnel, the Korea Expressway Corporation only began follow-up measures, such as preventing secondary accidents, 13 minutes later after being notified by the police.

The Expressway Corporation explained that the video display for that specific location had stopped working due to equipment aging.

Out of approximately 9,000 highway CCTVs nationwide, 6,200 are located inside tunnels to monitor accidents which easily lead to major damage, but the Expressway Corporation realized fewer than half of the accidents through CCTVs.

An analysis of 58 tunnel fatal accidents over the past five years showed that the time it took for the Expressway Corporation to realize them averaged 3 minutes and 54 seconds, which is twice as slow as the average for all accidents.

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 the control room monitoring highway CCTVs.

On average, the number of CCTVs monitored by a single employee is about 52 during the day and 77 at night.

Although there are automatic detection CCTVs that automatically detect and notify unexpected situations such as stationary vehicles or driving in the wrong direction, there are not a few cases where actions are taken only after receiving police notification or witness reports even after the automatic alarms go off.

[Hwang Hee / National Assembly Land, Infrastructure and Transport Committee Member (Democratic Party): Because tunnels have a high possibility of leading to secondary and tertiary accidents, and also a high possibility of multi-vehicle collisions, I think it is very urgently necessary to establish a technological system that does not miss the golden time.]

The Korea Expressway Corporation stated that it will apply AI technology to about 4,000 CCTVs by the end of this year to detect unexpected situations such as accidents inside tunnels more quickly.

(Video Journalist: Bae Moon-san | Video Editor: Lee So-young | Designer: Jang Seong-beom, Jeon Yu-geun)