Hazard awareness in property refurbishment work: An analysis on court case precedents

Abstract

Due to the absence of the original building plan, low foreseeability and work environment uncertainty, workers do not have time to read building structure documents and specific work requirements and underestimate the complexity of the work; working for a refurbishment project is not safer than that for a new building. This study reviewed the construction accidents court cases in refurbishment and demolition work in Hong Kong from 1990 to 2019 in the legal databases Westlaw Asia and LexisHK. It found that some victims preferred to take risks, indicating low hazard awareness, while others were ignorant and did not know the causes of the accidents even after their injuries. Furthermore, many employers’ hazard awareness is low because they do not aware of hazardous areas. Some supervisors did not instruct their employees to use the protective equipment even though it is provided. As we may some construction sites have already utilised robots with weak artificial intelligence, this article raised a futuristic question regarding the hazard awareness responsibility of autonomous robots with strong artificial intelligence.