A fire in a garment factory in Pakistan’s commercial capital of Karachi yesterday left 289 people dead and dozens injured in the biggest industrial accident in the country’s history.
The death toll may rise further because there were over 2,000 people in the factory when the fire broke out, Roshan Ali Shaikh, district coordination officer, said by phone.
Karachi, a city of 20 million people, is home to over 12,000 factories, many of which don’t comply with safety standards. Thousands of industrial workers are employed as casual labor and not insured for accidents.
“Inspection of industrial units by the provincial labor department was mandatory under the rules until 1997 when it was banned after demands by influential industrialists in the Sindh and Punjab provinces,” Shujah-ud-Din, a senior research associate at the Pakistan Institute of Labour, Education and Research, said by phone from Karachi. Factory accidents claimed 419 lives in 2008, the latest data available, he said.
Cracks have developed in the Karachi building after it caught fire yesterday evening, slowing the effort to rescue as many as 25 people still trapped in the basement, Ihtesham Uddin, the chief fire officer in Karachi, told reporters today. “The number of casualties is so large because there were no emergency doors or extra stairways in the factory.”
A boiler in the factory burst into flames, engulfing all four floors that were connected by a single staircase and trapping people inside, Hamid Khan, a rescue worker, said at Civil Hospital where he had come to deliver bodies to the mortuary.
The fire resulted in the most casualties in a single industrial incident in Pakistan’s history, according to the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research.
“The bodies began coming in at 7:30 p.m. last evening and are still being brought in,” Tariq Kamal Ayubi, the head of the emergency room at Civil Hospital, said in an interview.
The incident occurred the same evening as a shoe factory was engulfed in flames in the eastern city of Lahore killing 25, Pakistani media reported.
The Lahore shoe factory was engulfed in flames after a power generator caught fire when workers tried to start it because of an electricity failure.
The owner of Ali Enterprises, the garment factory in Karachi, has fled, GEO television reported, without saying where it got the information.
To contact the reporters on this story: Khurrum Anis in Karachi at [email protected]; Augustine Anthony in Karachi at [email protected].
To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Merritt at [email protected]
The death toll may rise further because there were over 2,000 people in the factory when the fire broke out, Roshan Ali Shaikh, district coordination officer, said by phone.
Karachi, a city of 20 million people, is home to over 12,000 factories, many of which don’t comply with safety standards. Thousands of industrial workers are employed as casual labor and not insured for accidents.
“Inspection of industrial units by the provincial labor department was mandatory under the rules until 1997 when it was banned after demands by influential industrialists in the Sindh and Punjab provinces,” Shujah-ud-Din, a senior research associate at the Pakistan Institute of Labour, Education and Research, said by phone from Karachi. Factory accidents claimed 419 lives in 2008, the latest data available, he said.
Cracks have developed in the Karachi building after it caught fire yesterday evening, slowing the effort to rescue as many as 25 people still trapped in the basement, Ihtesham Uddin, the chief fire officer in Karachi, told reporters today. “The number of casualties is so large because there were no emergency doors or extra stairways in the factory.”
A boiler in the factory burst into flames, engulfing all four floors that were connected by a single staircase and trapping people inside, Hamid Khan, a rescue worker, said at Civil Hospital where he had come to deliver bodies to the mortuary.
The fire resulted in the most casualties in a single industrial incident in Pakistan’s history, according to the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research.
“The bodies began coming in at 7:30 p.m. last evening and are still being brought in,” Tariq Kamal Ayubi, the head of the emergency room at Civil Hospital, said in an interview.
The incident occurred the same evening as a shoe factory was engulfed in flames in the eastern city of Lahore killing 25, Pakistani media reported.
The Lahore shoe factory was engulfed in flames after a power generator caught fire when workers tried to start it because of an electricity failure.
The owner of Ali Enterprises, the garment factory in Karachi, has fled, GEO television reported, without saying where it got the information.
To contact the reporters on this story: Khurrum Anis in Karachi at [email protected]; Augustine Anthony in Karachi at [email protected].
To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Merritt at [email protected]