Bangladeshi garment factories are routinely built without consulting engineers. Many are in commercial or residential buildings not designed to withstand the stress of heavy manufacturing. Some add illegal extra floors atop support columns too weak to hold them, according to a survey of scores of factories by an engineering university.
A separate inspection by the garment industry of 200 risky factories found that 10 percent of them were so dangerous they were ordered to shut. The textiles minister said a third inspection, conducted by the government, could show that as many as 300 factories were unsafe.
Taken together, the findings offer the first broad look at just how unsafe the working conditions are for the garment workers who produce clothing for major Western brands. And it’s more bad news for the $20 billion industry that has been struggling after a November fire at the Tazreen Fashions Ltd. factory that killed 112 people and the April collapse of the Rana Plaza building that killed 1,129 people.
And on Thursday, a fire erupted at a garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka. The blaze erupted in the Ashulia industrial district, on the northern tier of Dhaka, at about 9:30 a.m. on the ground floor of Arba Textile Limited. Black smoke poured out of the windows as some workers were injured while rushing to escape. No fatalities were reported and firefighters doused the flames within about two hours.
Rana Plaza was “a wakeup call for everybody” to ensure their buildings were structurally sound, said Shahidullah Azim, vice president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association.
“Earlier it was not in our minds. We never, ever thought of this,” he said.
After the Rana collapse, the government and the garment manufacturers asked the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology to begin evaluating the buildings. The university formed 15 teams of two engineers each — a structural expert and a foundation expert — to conduct initial inspections, examining a building’s support columns, frame, foundation and the soil it was built on, said Mujibur Rahman, head of the university’s department of civil engineering.
Rahman said further tests using sophisticated equipment will be completed in the coming months.
While initial inspections showed that many of the factories appeared safe, some had problems so serious that engineers recommended they be immediately shut down. Others were told to seal off the illegal floors at the tops of their buildings and gingerly remove the heavy equipment stored there.
The engineers found that huge numbers of the factories were housed in commercial or residential buildings not designed to withstand the vibrations and heavy loads of industrial use, Rahman said. Machinery vibrations were blamed as one of the causes along with additional illegal floors as the cause of the Rana collapse.
They found a building approved for only six stories that had been expanded to 10. Support columns that were supposed to have five steel bars inside them had only two. Other columns were too small to support the structures. Some of the buildings had structural cracks that threatened their integrity.
In one report, the engineers found structural cracks on two columns and a heavy power generator located on the roof, where its vibrations could threaten the building’s integrity. They recommended sealing all the floors above the ground floor pending a more thorough assessment. Rahman said he told the owners it would be safer just to demolish the building and start over.
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