National Post (National Edition)
Inferno claims 67 lives in Bangladesh
Fire rips through densely packed historic district
DH AKA, BANGLADESH • A devastating fire raced through densely packed buildings in a centuries-old district in Bangladesh’s capital, killing at least 67 people, officials and witnesses said Thursday.
The fire in Dhaka’s Chawkbazar area was mostly under control after more than 10 hours of frantic firefighting efforts. About 50 people were injured, with some critically burned.
The district dating to the Mughal era 400 years ago is crammed with buildings separated by narrow alleys, with residences commonly above shops, restaurants or warehouses on the ground floors. Denizens of the Muslim-majority nation throng to Chawkbazar each year for traditional goods to celebrate iftar, when the daily fast is broken during Ramadan.
“I was talking to a customer, suddenly he shouted at me, ‘Fire! Fire!’ ” said Javed Hossain, a survivor who came to assess the damage to his grocery store Thursday afternoon. “I said ‘ Oh, Allah,’ in a fraction of a second the fire caught my shop.”
Hossain’s brother took his hand and they leaped onto the street before the shop was engulfed in flames.
Outside the gutted store, the road was strewn with charred vehicles, pieces of still-burning metal and plastics and hundreds of cans of body deodorant.
The blaze started late Wednesday night in one building and quickly spread to others, fire department Director General Brig. Gen. Ali Ahmed said.
Many of the victims were trapped inside the buildings, said Mahfuz Riben, a control room official for the Fire Service and Civil Defence in Dhaka.
“Our teams are working there but many of the recovered bodies are beyond recognition. Our people are using body bags to send them to the hospital morgue, this is a very difficult situation,” he told The Associated Press.
Fire officials initially said 81 bodies had been recovered, but later lowered the number to 67.
Russel Shikder, a fire department duty officer, said first responders had counted each body bag taken to the morgue as one victim, but that some bags contained only body parts, prompting a recount.
Shikder said there was “no more confusion” about the tally.
First responders were delayed in reaching the site in part because nearby roads were closed for national holiday commemorations on Thursday. Just after midnight as the fire blazed, Bangladesh’s prime minister and president laid wreaths at a monument less than a two kilometres away to commemorate protesters who died in a 1952 demonstration for the right to speak Bengali, the local language.
Fire officials said the road closures worsened traffic, slowing down some of the fire trucks rushing to the site.
Most buildings in Chawkbazar are used both for residential and commercial purposes despite warnings of the potential for high fatalities from fires after one killed at least 123 people in 2010.
The government has zoning laws and regulations on the books, but has met with public resistance when trying to enforce them, Bangladesh planning experts said Thursday.
Business owners in old Dhaka routinely bribe government employees responsible for building oversight, they said.
A government eviction drive in Chawkbazar and other areas of Old Dhaka was met with protests last May right before Eid, the beginning of Ramadan, by business owners and residents.
According to local reports, some 500 illegal stands were evicted from the narrow streets. In response, hundreds of legal shops closed in protest.
Dr. Md. Manjur Morshed, an assistant professor of urban planning at Khulna University of Engineering and Technology in Khulna, said government regulations are routinely flouted in Chawkbazar.
“This is a historic area with a distinct culture,” he said. “They are not really abiding by the government’s rules.”
Such tragedies are shockingly common in Bangladesh, where fires, floods, ferry sinkings and other disasters regularly claim dozens of lives or more.
In 2012, a fire raced through a garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka, killing at least 112 people trapped behind its locked gates. Fewer than six months later, another building housing garment factories collapsed, killing more than 1,100 people.
The death toll from the latest fire could still rise because some of the injured people were in critical condition, said Samanta Lal Sen, head of a burn unit in the Dhaka Medical College Hospital.
Sen said at least nine of the critically injured people were being treated in his unit.
Witnesses told local TV stations that many gas cylinders stored in the buildings continued to explode one after another. They said the fire also set off explosions in fuel tanks of some vehicles that were stuck in traffic in front of the destroyed buildings.
By Thursday afternoon, shops had opened and the streets were crowded in much of Chawkbazar, except for within a police cordon where authorities continued to comb through the destruction left by the blaze.
The fire was about 500 metres away from Dhaka’s 18th-century Central Jail, a former Mughal fort where ex-prime minister and opposition leader Khaleda Zia has been held since February of last year on corruption charges. Since 2016, the jail has only been used to hold opposition figures, and Zia is currently the only inmate. It was not threatened by the fire.