“He called me by phone last night and said he would be back home in an hour. But after the fire I heard nothing from him,” she told AFP.
Hossain said that most of the 3,000 people who work at the factory had left before the fire started.
Local fire service chief M. Akteruzzaman told AFP firefighters had struggled to bring the flames under control.
“There is an acute shortage of water in the area, which makes the job to control the fire very difficult,” he said.
Fire service director Mahbubur Rahman said the blaze spread because emergency services took more than an hour to reach the site.
“There is no fire station within a 3O kilometre (20 mile) radius of the factory,” he said.
Safety standards at Bangladesh’s 4,500 garment factories, where workers toil for 10-12 hours a day for a monthly minimum wage of $38, are notoriously lax and fires are a common problem.
Mohammad Abu Saan, who works at the factory in Sripur, said that the fire had started when a knitting machine burst into flames on the factory floor and then spread to a warehouse.
“There have been quite a few small fires in the machine recently. But we managed to douse them. This time it was big,” he said.
Earlier police and fire officials said the blaze started in a boiler.
Thousands of Bangladesh garment workers walked off the job last month, blocking roads and attacking factories outside the capital and demanding a $100 minimum monthly wage.
Bangladesh is the world’s second largest garment manufacturer after China, with the bulk of its $21.5 billion annual shipments going to top Western retailers such as Walmart, H&M and Inditex.
But the vast majority of the impoverished nation’s three million workers earn a basic monthly wage of 3,000 taka ($38) among the lowest in the world following a tripartite deal between unions, the government and manufacturers in August 2010.
Pope Francis has said the wages are akin to “slave labour”.
About The Author
