Three years after the deadly collapse of a road tunnel, families of the people who died have urged greater attention to aging infrastructure nationwide.

A false ceiling in a highway tunnel in Yamanashi Prefecture collapsed in December 2012, crushing vehicles. Pins holding concrete panels in place were found to have rusted through.

Kunio Matsumoto, 64, father of a 28-year-old woman who died, was among the people who laid flowers and offered prayers for the nine victims at the Chuo Expressway’s Sasago Tunnel.

“When I think this is the place where Rei was pinned under the collapsed roof, all these emotions well up inside me,” Matsumoto said, referring to his daughter. “I’ve been put through many emotions these three years.”

Meanwhile, the 64-year-old father of fellow victim Shigeyuki Mori, 27, said he hoped the government and the operating firm had drawn lessons from the accident.

“Shigeyuki’s death should be a wake-up call,” the father said, addressing the press for the first time since the accident.

The incident involved panels comprising a false ceiling above the Tokyo-bound section of the tunnel. They fell, crushing three cars and killing nine people and injuring two others.

An inspection of the ceiling found 670 defects and other problems. Bolts that held the slabs in place had failed.

Since July 2014, all governmental institutions, highway operators and local governments have been obliged to conduct inspections of civil engineering projects under their administration. The list includes roughly 720,000 bridges, of which 480,000 are under the jurisdiction of local municipalities, and 10,000 tunnels. The checks must be completed by fiscal 2018.

But data released by the transport ministry in its annual report have shown that inspectors looked at only around 60,000 bridges in fiscal 2014. The progress rate for sites administered by the state government stood at 15 percent, while only 7 percent of sites under the jurisdiction of municipalities were inspected.

Meanwhile, as many as 13 percent of the sites administered by the state government and 16 percent of those overseen by municipalities have been designated as in need for renovation.

The poor inspection record in smaller towns and rural areas is blamed on financial problems and a resultant lack of staff.

The ministry reports that 30 percent of towns and 60 percent of villages lacked engineers specializing in monitoring and maintaining bridges, roads and other civil engineering projects.

Most of the municipalities lacking financial resources to cover the maintenance costs are said to be seeking subsidies from the central government.

To address the situation, the ministry has offered to train municipal government officers on facility maintenance. It is also working with research institutes and manufacturers to deploy drones and robots in understaffed areas.

“If (administrators) had performed a thorough check, the ceiling wouldn’t have collapsed,” Mori’s father said.

He was among a group of parents of five of the nine victims who in May 2013 sued Nagoya-based Central Nippon Expressway Co., the tunnel operator, for ¥890 million in damages.

The families blamed the company for failing to repair the aging structure.

The lawsuit accused the Nagoya-based operator and a Tokyo-based subsidiary of failing to carry out repairs despite the tunnel’s age.

According to the court, the operator failed to conduct tests to check the anchoring bolts in September 2012 during routine checks.

The company’s officials rejected this and denied responsibility for the disaster. They said even an inspection of every bolt might have not prevented the roof’s failure.