Fire fighters and local people work together to put out the fire at a packaging factory in Tongi industy area outside Dhaka, Bangladesh.
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More than 70 people have been injured, according to reports.
The fire started when a boiler of the four-story factory exploded while employees were inside the facility in in Gazipur district, local police chief Harunur Rashid said.
‘There were about 100 people inside when the fire broke out, ‘ Mohammad Nayan, a worker assisting with rescue efforts, told reporters.
Chemicals may have been stored on the ground floor of the factory, helping to explain how the blaze that began at 6 am (0000 GMT) spread so fast, said Tahmidul Islam of Bangladesh’s industrial police unit.
Saturday’s blaze was the country’s worst industrial accident since the Rana Plaza building collapse of 2013 that killed 1,135 garment sector workers, and raises further questions about Bangladesh’s safety record. Global retailers have flocked to the South Asian country’s cut-price, high-volume garment industry, which has become the world’s third-largest exporter of clothing, after China and Italy.
Labour rights groups urged the Bangladesh government and Western companies to work harder to protect the safety of workers in their supply chains.
It took more than 20 fire fighting teams to bring the blaze under control.
However, weak fire protection systems are common in factories in Bangladesh.
“We are now unaware of the precise cause of the fire, but have been informed that theBangladesh government has set up a formal investigation”. In 2012, 112 workers died in a fire at a factory just outside the capital.
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BD struggles to search factory after deadly fire was posted in World of TheNews International – https://www.thenews.com.pk on September 12, 2016 and was last updated on September 12, 2016.
