A two-day expo showcasing building and fire safety products as also services under one roof in the city concluded on Monday. The expo comes on the heel of the inspection of the state of readymade garments units and their safety measures now underway. One can discern that the retailers of apparels from Bangladesh mean business. Their message is loud and clear. Through this fair they surely will be able to draw attention to the twin purposes of holding it right in the Bangladesh capital. They want to make all familiar with the products that can minimise the risk of fire in garments factories and at the same time reduce vulnerability of such buildings. Sure enough, companies participating in the expo have on their mind business promotion. But the foreign buyers have let it understand that despite the fire tragedies, building collapse and political turmoil, they are not willing to abandon Bangladesh as a source of their apparels. And the indication and willingness should not be misread by the local apparel manufacturers.
Already, factory owners have started complaining that they cannot afford relocation of their factories from shared buildings and installation of many of the equipment and safety gadgets. But anyone can see that this is a wrong approach. There is no point housing an apparel factory in buildings where other business concerns are also housed. In designs and facilities, buildings of garments factories have to be fundamentally different because of various heavy machines they need for different purposes. The critical issue of fire safety cannot be addressed fully unless fire sprinklers are within easy reach. But factory owners grumble that they will have to close down their units for the purpose for sometime and again some of the suggestions made by foreign experts do not conform to the law of the land. These are the grounds the garments manufacturers are advancing in order to circumvent the most needed investment for making the garments factories fool-proof against frequent accidental fires.
The expo will give an idea of what a modern garments unit ought to be in terms of safety measures. It matters how the architectural design and facilities within the building are created. In the context of two large such factory buildings' collapse, there is need to be extra-cautious. Yet that takes care of just one area of the problem. The other vulnerability to frequent fire incidents - some of them of the proportion of literally an inferno - in which scores of garments workers perished also demands serious scrutiny. This expo should provide an answer to many of the weaknesses and lapses the country's garments units have been inheriting. There is a need for getting the acts together once for all so that tragedies of the order of Tazreen and Rana Plaza can be avoided. The investment is to be made once but its benefits will be enjoyed over a long period of time. There lies the rationality of the argument in favour of modernising the factory after equipping them with all the required safety gadgets.
Expo on building and fire safety
FE Team | Published: February 25, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00
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