SAVAR, Bangladesh - Deep cracks visible in the walls of a Bangladesh garment building had compelled police to order it evacuated a day before it collapsed, officials said Thursday. At least 275 people were killed when the eight-story building splintered into a pile of concrete because factories based there ignored the order and kept more than 2,000 people working.
Wednesday’s disaster in the Dhaka suburb of Savar is the worst ever for Bangladesh’s booming and powerful garment industry, surpassing a fire less than five months earlier that killed 112 people.Workers at both sites made clothes for major brands around the world; some of the companies in the building that fell say their customers include retail giants such as Wal-Mart.
Hundreds of rescuers, some crawling through the maze of rubble in search of survivors and corpses, workedthrough the night and all day Thursday amid the cries of the trapped and the wails of workers’ relatives gathered outside the building, called Rana Plaza. It housed several garment factories and a handful of other companies.
Late Thursday, rescuers located 40 survivors trapped in a room on the fourth floor, said Brig. Gen. Mohammed Siddiqul Alam Shikder, who is overseeing the rescue operations.
He said 12 of the workers had been rescued and emergency teams were working to free the others.
Shikder said this morning that 61 survivors had been rescued since Thursday afternoon.
An Associated Press cameraman who went elsewhere into the rubble with rescue crews spoke briefly to a garment worker pinned face down in the darkness between concrete slabs and next to two corpses. Mohammad Altab pleaded for help, but rescuers were unable to free him.
“Save us, brother. I begyou, brother. I want to live,” Altab moaned. “It’s so painful here … I have two little children.”
After the cracks were reported in the walls of Rana Plaza on Tuesday, managers of a bank that also had an office in the building evacuated their workers. The garment factories, though, kept working, ignoring the instructions of the industrial police, said Mostafizur Rahman, a director of the specialized police force.
The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association also asked the factories to suspend work starting Wednesday morning, hours before the collapse.
“After we got the crack reports, we asked them to suspend work until further examination, but they did not pay heed,” said Atiqul Islam, the group’s president.
On Thursday, the odor of rotting bodies wafted through holes cut into the building. Bangladesh’s junior minister for home affairs, Shamsul Haque, said that by midday Thursday, 2,000 people hadbeen rescued from the wreckage.
Dozens of bodies, their faces covered, were laid outside a school building so relatives could identify them. Thousands of workers’ relatives gathered outside the building, waiting for news, and thousands of garment workers from nearby factories took to the streets across the industrial zone in protest.
Shikder said rescue operations were progressing slowly and carefully to save as many people as possible.
He said rescue teams were standing by with heavy equipment and would “start bulldozing the debris once we get closer to the end of the operation. But now we are careful.”
He also said the huge crowd that remained at thecollapse site Thursday was interfering with getting more rescuers to the scene.
The garment manufacturers group said the factories in Rana Plaza employed 3,122 workers, but it was not clear how many were in the building when it collapsed.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 04/26/2013