SAVAR, Bangladesh: An eight-story building containing several garment factories and thousands of workers collapsed in Bangladesh yesterday, killing at least 113 people with many more feared dead.
Only the ground floor of the Rana Plaza in the town of Savar just outside the capital Dhaka remained intact when the block, which one minister said was illegally constructed, imploded at about 9:00 a.m. (0300 GMT). Armed with concrete cutters and cranes, hundreds of fire service and army rescue workers struggled to find survivors in the mountain of concrete and mangled steel which resembled the aftermath of an earthquake. Corpses and the injured were evacuated from the higher reaches of the pile of flattened floors with makeshift slides made from cloth which just hours earlier was being cut into shirts and trousers for export to Western markets.
“The rescue work is going on in full swing. But it’ll take days to complete the task. It’s a huge tragedy,” Zehadul Islam, a major in the fire department, told AFP. Hiralal Roy, a senior emergency ward doctor at the nearby Enam Hospital where victims were being taken, told AFP that the death toll was 82 and at least 1,000 injured people had been treated at the hospital. “Most of the dead are garment workers. The toll will rise as the conditions of some of the injured were critical,” he told AFP, adding the hospital had appealed for emergency blood donations.
Some workers complained that the building had developed cracks on Tuesday evening, triggering an evacuation, but they had been forced back to the production lines by their managers.
“The managers forced us to rejoin and just one hour after we entered the factory the building collapsed with a huge noise,” said a 24-year-old worker who gave her first name as Mousumi.
“I am injured. But I’ve not found my husband who was working on the fourth floor,” she told AFP, estimating that 5,000 people worked inside the building, which also housed apartments, a bank and shops. Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) said that the factories at the building employed more than 2,600 workers.
Masuda Begum, 22, an operator, told AFP from a bed at Rose Clinic in Savar that she survived by moving under a sewing machine as the roof fell down. “The whole building was shaking just half an hour after we started work. There were hundreds of workers on our floor. Suddenly it became dark. A few of us managed to crawl out but I don’t know what happened to others,” she told AFP.
Home Minister Muhiuddin Khan told reporters that the building was illegal and violated the country’s building code. The huge death toll was likely to raise further questions about safety in the garment industry.
Bangladesh has the second-biggest clothing industry in the world, supplying to major Western brands, but it is plagued by regular accidents and demonstrations from workers demanding better wages and working conditions.
In November, a fire at a garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka killed 111 workers in the industry’s worst accident.
The accident happened at a time when Bangladesh was under fire from the Western nations to improve its factory conditions. The US has already threatened to cut duty free facilities to some of Bangladeshi products.
One of the factories housed in the collapsed building in Savar was New Wave Style, which on its website lists Mango of Spain and Italian brand Benetton as among its top buyers.
The owner of the factory Bazlus Samad could not be contacted despite several calls to his number.
Building collapses are relatively common in Bangladesh as developers often flout the official construction code when erecting multi-storey structures.
More than 70 people were killed after a multi-storey garment factory collapsed in the Savar area in 2005.
In November at least 13 people were killed after an under-construction flyover fell down in the port city of Chittagong.
