DHAKA, Bangladesh — In the panic that spread after shouts of “fire” sent workers racing out of the Apparel Today factory, 23-year-old Morzina Begum was injured after tumbling over a broken railing and bled to death.

There was no fire — it was a false alarm.

Garment workers in Bangladesh’s capital city are worried. In the weeks since a Nov. 24 blaze at Tazreen Fashion killed more than 100 people, at least 18 smaller, nonfatal fires have broken out at garment factories around Dhaka. There have been at least 150 factory fires in the country so far this year.

“These incidents happen on a regular basis,” said Ineke Zeldenrust, international coordinator for the laborrights group Clean Clothes Campaign in Amsterdam. “The Bangladesh garment industry is growing very rapidly, so the capacity of this city and its infrastructure to absorb that is at its limits.”

Surging wages and inflation in China, the largest apparel supplier, have prompted retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Sears Holdings to shift production to Bangladesh. In response, an $18 billion manufacturing industry has sprung up, trying to get by in factories located in buildings with poor electrical wiring, insufficient exits and little firefighting equipment.

“Firefighting equipment is not adequate,” said Abdus Salam Murshedy, president of Exporters Association of Bangladesh and managing director of textile company Envoy Group. “There are some factories that do not have easily accessible fire exits.”

At a fire at a Swan Group warehouse just two days after the fatal one at Tazreen, Kalpona Akter of the nongovernmental organization Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity saw workers climb down a bamboo pole because they couldn’t exit through the building’s stairs.

Swan’s factory is in compliance with workplace safety rules, said Feroz Kobir Prodhan, the company’s manager of administration, human resources and compliance. But the building housing the company’s warehouse is not, he said.

There were no deaths in the 18 smaller fires since the Tazreen blaze, according to data compiled by Bangladesh Fire Service and Civil Defence.

About 700 garment-industry workers have died in this south Asian country since 2005 because of unsafe buildings, according to the International Labor Rights Forum.

Tazreen’s factory had no emergency exits, and many workers were burned alive as they got trapped in heavy smoke, Muhammad Mahboob, a director at the Fire Service and Civil Defence said after the fire. Workers at Tazreen made clothes for Bentonville-based Wal-Mart, which has said it has fired a supplier that was not authorized to send orders to that facility.

Bangladesh’s ready-made garment exports surged almost fourfold in the last decade to $17.9 billion in 2011, or 78 percent of the nation’s total exports, according to the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association.

The global garment industry would have to spend about $3 billion over five years to change safety standards at Bangladeshi apparel factories to meet Western standards, according to an analysis provided to Bloomberg News by the Worker Rights Consortium.

The European Union was the destination for about 60 percent of Bangladesh’s garment exports in the year ended June 2012, and another 28 percent went to the United States and Canada, according to data from the garment association.

“Brands are not saying they’re going to fix this before they expand production into the country — they’re just flooding the place with orders,” said Zeldenrust, the labor-rights group coordinator. “And manufacturers are accepting orders even when they don’t have the capacity to safely produce.”

Garment workers in Bangladesh, on average, earn about $43 a month, compared with $150 to $250 in China and $87 in India, according to a 2012 report from the World Bank, which cited 2010 data.

“Ultimately, the price per garment will go up, because the manufacturer will have to make certain investments and have certain costs,” Zeldenrust said. “At the same time, the cost of producing in Bangladesh is so cheap right now that the guess is the supply chain can actually absorb that.”

Wal-Mart has visited supplier factories to identify those deemed “high risk for fire safety hazards,” it said on its website. In 2011, the company said it stopped working with 49 factories in Bangladesh because of fire-safety issues.

Morzina Begum, the woman who died in the stampede at the Apparel Today factory, came from Mymensingh, a northern district, and earned 5,000 taka, about $62, a month, said Kamal Hossain, deputy general manager of the company’s human resources and compliance office. The company makes clothes for European and American buyers through subcontracts.

Begum fell as a railing collapsed and bled to death on the way to the hospital. “It was a sad, unfortunate incident,” Hossain said.

The fires have convinced some apparel workers that the jobs are not worth the risks. Sohrab Ali Sheikh, 48, on a visit from Rajbari, an impoverished central district, said he was here to convince his two garment-worker daughters to return home.

“I don’t want to see my daughters die in a fire this way. If I can survive in my village, so can they,” Sheikh said, standing near the burned-out Tazreen Fashion.

Business, Pages 71 on 12/16/2012