Fire revealed a gap in safety for global brands
The fire alarm shattered the monotony of the Tazreen Fashions factory. Hundreds of seamstresses looked up from their machines, startled. On the third floor, Shima Akhter Pakhi had been stitching hoods onto fleece jackets. Now she ran to a staircase.
But two managers were blocking the way. Ignore the alarm, they ordered. It was just a test. Back to work. A few women laughed nervously. Pakhi and other workers returned to their sewing tables. She could stitch a hood to a jacket in about 90 seconds. She arranged the fabric under her machine. Ninety seconds. Again. Ninety more seconds. She sewed six pieces, maybe seven.
Then she looked up.
Smoke was filtering up through the three staircases.
Screams rose from below. The two managers had vanished. Power suddenly went out throughout the eight-story building. There was nowhere to escape. The staircases led down into the fire. Iron grilles blocked the windows.
“We all panicked,†Pakhi said. “It spread so quickly. And there was no electricity. It was totally dark.â€
The factory was not a safe place to work.
Yet Tazreen was making clothing destined for some of the world's top retailers. On the third floor, where firefighters later recovered 69 bodies, Pakhi was stitching sweater jackets for C&A, a European chain.
On the fifth floor, workers were making Faded Glory shorts for Walmart. Ten bodies were recovered there.
In all, 112 workers were killed in a blaze last month. After the fire, Walmart, Sears and other retailers made the same startling admission: They say they did not know that Tazreen Fashions was making their clothing.
Yet Tazreen Fashions received orders anyway, slipping through the gaps in the system by delivering the low costs and quick turnarounds that buyers -- and consumers -- demand.
Walmart and Sears have since said they fired the suppliers that subcontracted work to Tazreen Fashions. Yet some critics have questioned how a company like Walmart, one of the two biggest buyers in Bangladesh and renowned for its sophisticated global supply system, could have been unaware of the connection.
The factory's owner, Delowar Hossain, said his managers arranged work through local middlemen. “We don't know the buyers,†he said in an interview. “The local man is important. The buyer -- I don't care.â€
In the United States, Labour Secretary Hilda L Solis compared the Tazreen blaze to the 1911 Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in New York, which led to sweeping reforms of American sweatshops.
'PRECIOUS' ESCAPE TIME IS LOST
Several months ago, Shima Akhter Pakhi was summoned to the sixth floor of Tazreen Fashions. Pakhi, 24, had worked at the factory for three years.
Up on the sixth floor, managers were tapping her for fire safety duty.
The empty, unfinished sixth floor was nearly the size of a football field. Pakhi and a few other employees were handed fire extinguishers and taught to remove the pin, squeeze the handle and spray. They were also told that in the case of a fire on upper floors, employees should evacuate down the staircases in descending order from top to bottom.
“They did not tell us what we would do if the fire started on the ground floor,†Pakhi recalled.
Fire investigators say the blaze erupted on the cavernous ground floor after stacks of yarn and fabric caught fire. Had the fabric been stored in an enclosed, fireproof room, as required by law, the fire could have been contained and the workers could have escaped.
Instead, the blaze spread quickly, pushing up the staircases, along with toxic fumes from burning acrylic. Investigators discovered that few fire extinguishers had been used. And, finally, managers made a catastrophic mistake by initially dismissing the fire alarm.
“They killed time,†said Abu Nayeem Mohammad Shahidullah, the director general of Bangladesh's national fire service. “Time was so precious, so important. But they said it was a false alarm.â€
Managers had been preparing the factory for inspections from buyers and staged a drill a few days before the fire, several employees said. Pakhi said managers had even displayed photographs of the fire training session on bulletin boards.
“I think they took the pictures and hung them on the board to show the buyers,†she said. “They would see the pictures and think they have trained people to fight fires. But personally, I don't think I could fight fires with this training.â€
Tazreen Fashions is part of a larger garment conglomerate, the Tuba Group, which owns at least half a dozen apparel factories in Bangladesh.
Delowar Hossain said a team from Walmart's local office conducted a compliance audit last year and faulted the factory for excessive overtime, while making no mention of fire safety or other issues. Moreover, he said, the local buying houses had also inspected and approved the factory, tantamount, he assumed, to approval from Walmart and the other global brands these middlemen represented.
Kevin Gardner, a Walmart spokesman, said the company stopped authorising production at Tazreen “many months before the fire.†But he did not say why.
Accredited outside auditors inspected the factory on Walmart's behalf at least twice in 2011, he said. That May, auditors gave the factory an “orange†rating, meaning there were “higher-risk violations.†Three months later, the factory's grade improved to “yellow,†meaning there were “medium-risk violations.â€
Sears, in a statement, said its supplier “was not authorised†to produce goods at the Tazreen factory and that it had done so “in violation†of Sears's rules.
But David Hasanat, the chairman of the Viyellatex Group, one of the country's most highly regarded garment manufacturers, pointed out that global apparel retailers often depend on hundreds of factories to fill orders.
'SAVE US!'
On the sixth floor, Hashinur Rahman heard the screams and rushed to a staircase. He and others had been making satiny lingerie, but they pushed past a manager and began descending into thicker and thicker smoke. Ignoring the manager would save their lives.
The factory did not have ceiling sprinklers or an outdoor fire escape. Fire officials later concluded that the two staircases on the eastern side of the building were quickly overwhelmed with fire and toxic smoke. But officials say the lone western staircase remained passable for many minutes and provided an escape route for many survivors. About 1,150 people were working that night, and all of the roughly 300 workers on the second floor managed to escape down the stairs, fire officials said.
Hashinur Rahman, 32, had barely made it out of the building, along with many of his colleagues, when his cellphone rang. It was a friend who worked on the third floor. Hundreds of people were trapped.
“Save us!†the friend shouted. “Help us!â€
Hashinur said he ran to the narrow alley that separated the factory's western wall from a building under construction. The gap was maybe five feet. Work crews had covered the western wall with rickety bamboo scaffolding so they could put plaster on the exterior of the still-unfinished Tazreen factory.
Hashinur climbed the bamboo to a third-floor window covered with an iron grille. He leapt onto a concrete slab of the new building and found a brick. He began smashing the grille, trying to break it open. He looked inside and saw his co-workers' desperate faces. They were in the room where samples were made and sent to buyers for final approval, and they stood on sewing tables, pulling frantically on the grille.
Finally, the iron grille gave way.
A few men jumped to the concrete slab of the adjacent building. Leaning against the scaffolding, they reached across the gap to help co-workers make the leap. Women went first. Rahima made it across. So did Pakhi. On other floors, people smashed open windows or tore out exhaust fans and leapt into the darkness. Some landed on the metal roofs of nearby shanties. Some landed on the ground.
And some never made it out at all.
SON PHONES 'MA' BEFORE DYING
As word spread, people raced to the factory: mothers, fathers, husbands and wives.
Golapi Begum left her own factory job and raced to Tazreen Fashions to find her son, Palash Mian. He was 18 and worked on the fifth floor. Golapi Begum stared up at the factory and shrieked.
Then her cellphone rang. It was her son.
“Ma, I have no way to save my life,†he told her. “I cannot find any way to get out. I am in the bathroom of the fifth floor. I am wearing a black T-shirt. And I have a shirt wrapped around my waist. You will find me in the bathroom.â€
He hung up. He called his father, as well as several friends. Then his phone went dead.
“I became insane,†his mother said. “I spent the whole night in front of the main gate of the factory. I was screaming all the time.â€
She found him the next day. Rescuers had lined up all the recovered bodies on the grounds of a nearby school. Family members unzipped bag after bag, searching.
But Golapi unzipped a bag and found her son. She recognised his face. And he was wearing a black T-shirt.
She collected his body and returned it to their village, where he was buried.
(Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Ashulia, and Steven Greenhouse from New York)
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