Analysis of the Impact of Omitted Accidental Actions and the Method of Land Use on the Number of Construction Disasters (a Case Study of Poland)

Abstract

As climate changes progress we are dealing with violent and excessive environmental actions. However, the impacts of loads acting on a building object caused by unlikely phenomena such as: fire, explosion, flood, vehicle impact, plane impact, excessive snowfall, and excess wind gusts are still being ignored when analyzing the structure of building objects in the combinatorics of loads. The paper presents a multi-criteria approach to accidental actions and analyzes design situations and load combinations in relation to accidental actions. The existing legal acts were used to define the concept of a construction disaster. The authors verified, on the basis of applicable legal acts and design guidelines, individual analysis strategies for ensuring the safety of building objects and divided them into consequence classes of structural damage. They collected and analyzed the number of construction disasters which occurred in Poland between 1995–2019 (25 years) based on the data from the General Office of Building Control. The number of disasters was divided by voivodeships and causes and supplemented with the data on the number of people injured. The article presents the direction of research development that could be undertaken in order to eliminate future catastrophes caused by the omission of the analysis of the impact of accidental actions at the design stage. Statistical analyses were carried out to show whether land use, population density, and weather factors (wind) affect the number of recorded disasters. It has been shown that regions that have preserved the sustainable development of their territories are less vulnerable to disasters resulting from extreme weather events.