November 25, 2012 - MUMBAI, India — More than 100 people died Saturday and
Sunday in a fire at a garment factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, in one of the
worst industrial tragedies in that country.
It took firefighters all night to put out the blaze at
the factory, Tazreen Fashions, after it started about 7 p.m. on Saturday, a
retired fire official said by telephone from Dhaka, the capital. At least 111
people were killed, and scores of workers were taken to hospitals for treatment
of burns and smoke inhalation.
“The main difficulty was to put out the fire; the
sufficient approach road was not there,” said the retired official, Salim Nawaj
Bhuiyan, who now runs a fire safety company in Dhaka. “The fire service had to
take great trouble to approach the factory.”
Bangladesh’s garment industry, the second-largest
exporter of clothing after China, has a notoriously poor fire safety record.
Since 2006, more than 500 Bangladeshi workers have died in factory fires,
according to Clean Clothes Campaign, an anti-sweatshop
advocacy group in Amsterdam. Experts say many of the fires could have easily
been avoided if the factories had taken the right precautions. Many factories
are in cramped neighborhoods and have too few fire escapes, and they widely
flout safety measures. The industry employs more than three million workers in
Bangladesh, most of them women.
Activists say that global clothing brands like Tommy
Hilfiger and the Gap and those sold by Walmart need to take responsibility for
the working conditions in Bangladeshi factories that produce their clothes.
“These brands have known for years that many of the
factories they choose to work with are death traps,” Ineke Zeldenrust, the
international coordinator for the Clean Clothes Campaign, said in a statement.
“Their failure to take action amounts to criminal negligence.”
In a statement from the United States, Wal-Mart said,
“While we are trying to determine if the factory has a current relationship
with Walmart or one of our suppliers, fire safety is a critically important
area of Walmart’s factory audit program and we have been working across the
apparel industry to improve fire safety education and training in Bangladesh.”
The fire at the Tazreen factory in Savar, northwest of
Dhaka, started in a warehouse on the ground floor that was used to store yarn,
and quickly spread to the upper floors. The building was nine stories high,
with the top three floors under construction, according to a garment industry
official at the scene who asked not to be named because he was not authorized
to speak to the news media. Though most workers had left for the day when the
fire started, the industry official said, as many as 600 workers were still
inside working overtime.
The factory, which opened in May 2010, employed about
1,500 workers and had sales of $35 million a year, according to a document on
the company’s Web site. It made T-shirts, polo shirts and fleece jackets.
Most of the workers who died were on the first and
second floors, fire officials said, and were killed because there were not
enough exits. “So the workers could not come out when the fire engulfed the
building,” said Maj. Mohammad Mahbub, the operations director for the Fire
Department, according to The Associated Press.
In a telephone interview later on Sunday, Major Mahbub
said the fire could have been caused by an electrical fault or by a spark from
a cigarette.
In a brief phone call, Delowar Hossain, the managing
director of the Tuba Group, the parent company of Tazreen Fashions, said he was
too busy to comment. “Pray for me,” he said and then hung up.
Television news reports showed badly burned bodies
lined up on the floor in what appeared to be a government building. The injured
were being treated in hallways of local hospitals, according to the reports.
The industry official said that many of the bodies were
burned beyond recognition and that it would take some time to identify them.
One survivor, Mohammad Raju, 22, who worked on the
fifth floor, said he escaped by climbing out of a third-floor window onto the
bamboo scaffolding that was being used by construction workers. He said he lost
his mother, who also worked on the fifth floor, when they were making their way
down.
“It was crowded on the stairs as all the workers were
trying to come out from the factory,” Mr. Raju said. “There was no power
supply; it was dark, and I lost my mother in dark. I tried to search for her
for 10 to 15 minutes but did not find her.”
A document posted on Tazreen Fashions’ Web site
indicated that an “ethical sourcing” official for Walmart had flagged
“violations and/or conditions which were deemed to be high risk” at the factory
in May 2011, though it did not specify the nature of the infractions. The
notice said that the factory had been given an “orange” grade and that any
factories given three such assessments in two years from their last audit would
not receive any Walmart orders for a year.
A spokesman for Walmart, Kevin Gardner, said the
company was “so far unable to confirm that Tazreen is a supplier to Walmart nor
if the document referenced in the article is in fact from Walmart.”
But the International Labor Rights Forum, which tracks
fires in the Bangladesh garment industry, said documents and logos found in the
debris indicated that the factory produced clothes for Walmart’s Faded Glory
line as well as for other American and foreign companies.
Bangladesh exports about $18 billion worth of garments
a year. Employees in the country’s factories are among the world’s lowest-paid,
with entry-level workers making the government-mandated minimum wage of about
$37 a month or slightly above.
Tensions have been running high between workers, who
have been demanding an increase in minimum wages, and the factory owners and government.
A union organizer, Aminul Islam, who campaigned for better working conditions
and higher wages, was found tortured and killed outside Dhaka this year.
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