WOODEN WALKWAYS LACK SAFETY FEATURES

[Anchor Lead]

Local governments across the country are building deck trails on major walking paths and tourist attractions. However, many of these board trails have been found to be vulnerable to safety, and there were no installation or safety management standards. It was also found that many places didn't have insurance in place in case of accidents.

[Pkg]

A wooden walkway set around a lake. But some boards of the walkway are warped and some are missing after the fastening bolts fell out. There are no warnings or caution signs.

[Soundbite] (Walkway visitor) : "If not careful, somebody could fall through since some of the floorboards are gone. I almost fell a few times."

There are 189 wooden walkways built in Chungcheongbuk-do Province. They measure a combined 66.38 kilometers. However, there are no installation, safety or management criteria available for those boardwalks. The law classifies wooden walkways as a landscape facility, not as a small public facility. Therefore, they are not eligible for mandatory safety management oversight. The provincial government conducted a safety inspection and found that more than half the boardwalks in the province were not covered by liability insurance. This means when an accident occurs, one must go through a complicated process of requesting national reparation to get compensated. In fact, a man in his 20s had requested national reparation after he was seriously injured in a fall from walkway stairs in 2018. It took five long years for the government to rule that the local government's inadequate management was responsible for the accident and order some 59 million won in damage compensation to be paid to the victim.

[Soundbite] Kim Yeon-jun(Chungcheongbuk-do Prov. office) : "The provincial office wrote up a set of guidelines about wooden walkways and distributed them to county and city governments. We also proposed them to the central government to prevent accidents."

Wooden walkways are built all over the country to attract tourists. But they pose danger to visitors as the conditions of their safety features have not been completely assessed yet.