On April 24, 2013, an eight-story building in Dhaka, Bangladesh' capital, collapsed. Inside the garment factory inside the building, more than 3,000 people were working. The collapse of the building eventually killed 1,134 people and injured more than 2,500, making it one of the worst engineering disasters in history. The cause of this accident has also aroused the vigilance of the whole world.
Although Bangladesh is our neighbor, it has never had a sense of existence. As a country with a population of more than 100 million, this country is very poor, and the labor costs here are really low, so the output value of Bangladesh's garment processing industry can reach more than 20 billion US dollars per year, which is the pillar industry of the whole country. Of course, these workers do not have the slightest pity and protection from these large companies, they work in dusty factories all year round, and the safety of life and property is not protected in the slightest.
Before 2013, Bangladesh had many industrial giants taking on orders from all over the world, and Lana Tower was one of the most famous. The Lana tower is eight stories tall, and on each floor there are several garment factories, whether it is Walmart or Foley Mark, and even many well-known luxury brands have set up factories here.
With an average of more than 5,000 workers working every day in the factory, and a full range of living facilities such as shops and banks in the factory, it can be said that the whole building is a microcosm of Bangladeshi society.
In April 2013, Bangladesh conducted a raid on these garment buildings in its own capital. During the investigation on the 23rd, cracks appeared on the surface of the Lana Building. Inspectors have stated that all personnel in the building must be evacuated in order to conduct a thorough assessment of the building.
At that time, the TV station reported in detail on the cracking of the building, and some practitioners and experts in the construction industry said that the condition of the building was so serious that it could be said to be unusable. There are many such buildings in the capital Dhaka, and they are all crumbling, but the people who live here are full of luck and think that tragedy will not happen to them.
After hearing that the building was at risk of collapsing, shops and banks immediately chose to close and withdrew from the building. This situation surprised the owners of the garment factory, who believed that if the building stopped, they would lose a lot of orders, and once they lost the factory in the building, it meant that they needed to find a new place to start work, which was difficult for them to accept, so they chose to ignore the government's warnings and let the workers return to the factory to continue working.
Many workers expressed doubts about this situation, but the head of the factory told them that there was no problem with the safety of the building, and that it was only because someone wanted to make a profit from it that they tricked the workers into saying that there was a problem with the building. Moreover, the factory boss warned these workers that if they dared to leave work without permission, they would not get paid.
Many workers depend on this meager salary to support their families, so they dare not miss work. So the next day, they went to the closed and dark environment as usual to continue working. However, a catastrophe crept in.
Early in the morning of April 24, the factory began immediately, the spinning machines seemed to continue to move tirelessly, and there was no trace of joy on the faces of the workers. They need to work to support their families, and they worry that the ground under their feet may really crack, and tragedy will come.
At 9 a.m., the workers were still working intensively on the day's work, but the second half of the building suddenly began to collapse. In an instant, the main pillar and part of the front wall of the building suddenly turned into a cloud of dust. The sudden collapse surprised everyone, and a small three-story building next to it was buried in front of the collapsed building. Everything happened so quickly that it collapsed at a speed comparable to a directional blast, and only the foundation of the entire building remained intact.
As we all know, the majority of workers in the textile industry are women, and many women have their children in company-run nurseries. At the same time as the accident, there were many children in the building, and it is conceivable that the fate of these children is tragic.
The accident attracted special attention from Bangladesh, and the United Nations expressed great concern for the incident. Bangladesh's economy is so low that it is clearly unrealistic to rely on them to complete relief operations, so the United Nations said it would send relevant forces to help if necessary.
But when United Nations observers arrived on the scene, they found that the situation was more serious than they thought. Now the entire foundation is also crumbling, and it is easy to trigger secondary landslides. The entire rescue site must not use any heavy machinery, and there are many injured people still groaning under the rubble, so everyone can only take the hand-to-shoulder method to clean the walls and cement blocks.
The rescue work could not be delayed for a moment, but the government could not send enough rescuers, so many people spontaneously participated in the rescue. The volunteers didn't have any protective equipment at all, and many wore sandals in the heat. In such a complex and difficult environment, many volunteers began to rescue their compatriots.
The rescue effort lasted for 19 days, and during this 19-day period, the situation at the scene was like a living hell. The weather in Bangladesh is sweltering, and the water cannot be transported under the collapsed buildings. Until May 13, 2013, the rescue work was basically completed, and 2,500 people were rescued, but more than 1,100 people died tragically in the collapse accident.
According to locals, during the rescue operation, many relatives of employees cried and rushed to the ground, and the situation was unbearable. The accident has attracted widespread attention from the international community, and in the international media, some people have used the term "predictable massacre" to target the building's managers.
According to the investigation of the cause of the accident, the direct cause of the collapse of the building was caused by the vibration of a nearby generator. Before the collapse of the building, there had been a power outage, and the four diesel generators on the top floor for emergency power supply produced strong vibrations, coupled with the thousands of sewing machines in the building were also working, which led to an intensification of the vibrations, which eventually led to the collapse of the already hidden building.
The building was originally built in 2006 and was originally intended to be used as a shop or office. Therefore, when it was built, the use of heavy machinery was not taken into account at all. But in fact, the building did not meet the regulations, whether it was reinforced concrete or brick, it could not meet the construction requirements, and the foundation was not qualified.
The tower was even built directly on a pond filled with soil, and the ground underneath was extremely soft and did not have a stable structure from the beginning. And we saw from the building's tender that only four floors were approved, while the owners built it to eight floors without permission, and the last four floors were built without a load-bearing wall at all.
It can be said that this building has been full of safety hazards since the day it was built. When the truth came out, the whole of Bangladesh was caught up in the criticism of these garment factories.
Eight months after the disaster, Bangladesh and local labor groups raised $40 million in compensation to help the families of the victims get through the storm. As the compensation progressed, it seemed that the incident had finally come to an end, but in fact there were thousands of such factories still in operation in Bangladesh.
The workers among them are only temporarily lucky, and who knows if the same tragedy will happen again on any given day. From this incident, we should learn a lesson and put safe production first.