“We are dousing the blaze in parts of the factory from where the smoke are coming out”, fire service department director Lieutenant Colonel Mosharraf Hossain said.
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Around 5:30pm yesterday, fire fighters and rescue workers pushed hard to douse the flame completely and looked for survivors under the debris of the four-storey building in the BSCIC industrial area.
Senior firefighting official Anis Mahmud said his workers toiled through the night to douse the blaze but the structure was still too risky to enter properly to search through the debris. “We need to move a huge amount of debris otherwise searching is not possible”, he said.
Many others were critically injured in the explosion. The fire occurred as workers prepared to swap shifts in the morning.
The police said many workers may still be trapped inside the building.
The factory’s owner has also assured compensation for families of the victims. He told Reuters on Saturday that Tampaco was “fully compliant”.
Mikail Shipar, government secretary with the ministry of labour and employment, said the government was now probing safety at all factories in the Tongi industrial zone.
Shipar added that an investigation would be carried out and if anyone was found guilty of negligence, action would be taken. “As a result, the fire took no time to spread”, Islam said. “No one will be spared”.
The fire is the latest in a series of industrial accidents in the South Asian country, which is the world’s No. 2 garment exporter behind China. The Rana Plaza factory collapse incident is still fresh in minds for Bangladeshi people.
Factory safety is a major concern in Bangladesh, which has thousands of garment and packaging factories that supply products to global chains like Wal-Mart and H&M.
One official on Saturday said that the government’s focus so far had been mainly on garment factories, and less so on other industries, but that was now likely to change.
A spokesman of the factory was not immediately available for comment.
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“We have nearly brought the fire under control”.
