Depot fire latest to spotlight Bangladesh industrial safety

DHAKA, Bangladesh — Authorities in Bangladesh were still struggling Monday to determine the cause of a devastating fire that killed at least 49 people, including nine firefighters, and injured more than 100 others, officials and local media reported, as experts have raised concern over the safety standard in the country’s industrial sector.

Efforts to extinguish the fire at the BM Inland Container Depot, a Dutch-Bangladesh joint venture, continued overnight after the inferno broke out around midnight Saturday following explosions in a container full of chemicals.

Officials said the number of casualties rose over the weekend as many workers and firefighters were unaware of chemical storage at the depot, and after the initial fire they got close to the explosive containers. A few hundred workers and dozens of firefighters were attempting to extinguish the fire when the first explosion took place.

The depot is located near country’s main Chittagong Seaport, about 210 kilometers (130 miles) southeast of the capital, Dhaka, and it is one of 19 such depots in the region.

The latest fire has raised the concern over whether such facilities in Bangladesh, a burgeoning economy in South Asia, is maintaining safety standards.

Khairul Alam Sujan, vice president of Bangladesh Freight Forwarders Association, said Sunday that containers with hazardous chemicals were kept with those full of garment products ready for exports.

He said it was important to maintain distance from containers with any hazardous chemicals.

Firefighters said more than one dozen containers had hydrogen peroxide, which helped spread the fire after the explosion, but it was not clear what caused the initial explosion.

Bangladeshi media were critical of the institutional capacity in ensuring safety at such facility.

“The fire … is the latest in an ever-growing list of tragedies that put Bangladesh’s appalling industrial safety record once again under the spotlight,” the Daily Star newspaper…