Video: 'Bangladesh Garment Factory Fire Leaves 112 Dead'
(Saturday, November 24, 2012, 6:50 p.m. Bangladesh Standard Time; during the 2012 Dhaka garment factory fire) — At least 117 people died and over 200 were injured tonight and Sunday in a fire at a garment factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, the deadliest factory fire in the nation’s history.
It took firefighters all night to put out the blaze at the factory, Tazreen Fashions, after it started at about 6:50 p.m. Besides the least 117 people who were killed, 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 currently 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.
Video: 'Made in Bangladesh: Behind the Factory Fire - REWIND'
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.”
