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Fire Safety in the Readymade Garment Sector in Bangladesh: Structural Inadequacy Versus Management Deficiency

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Abstract

The readymade garment (RMG) industry plays a vital role in the socio-economic development of Bangladesh, yet the sector suffers from poor fire safety records. Given the lack of fire risk assessment in the industry, this paper develops a Fire Risk Index (FRI) for individual RMG factories and surveys 60 such factories to develop an understanding of the fire safety conditions in the sector. The paper differentiates the risk factors into structural (hard) and management related (soft) parameters and develops FRIs for the structural factors. The FRI for structural parameters is then compared with the FRI for management factors, published earlier. While an overall mean FRI of 2.12 on a 4 point scale indicates that fire safety condition is quite poor, the FRI for soft parameters (1.80) are even lower than the FRI for hard parameters (2.58), indicating the critical importance of the soft parameters in fire safety assessment of the RMG factories. Within the hard parameters, there appears to be more reliance on firefighting and means for escape than on precautionary measures to contain the fire, which could explain the higher frequency of fire occurrences in the industry. FRI for both hard and soft parameters appear to follow a U shaped relationship with factory size, possibly indicating a Kuznet’s effect in fire safety in the garment sector. The poor FRI for hard factors indicates large deviations from safety requirements set in this work and asks for a stricter monitoring and enforcement regime. Improving the performance in the soft parameters, however, would require changes in the safety culture and practices.

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Notes

  1. These parameters do not necessarily appear in the BFSCDA checklists, therefore the safety requirements that we discuss here are not BFSCDA regulatory criteria. All of these hard parameters, however, are part of the BNBC-93.

  2. For example, road width, announcement system should be part of means of escape, rather than precautionary requirements to limit fire growth.

  3. Kuznets hypothesized that as countries grow wealthier environmental pollution increased but then reduces as the wealth reaches a threshold. In fire safety this is possible as concerns for fire safety may not be a priority during the initial phases of growth of a factory, but beyond a threshold size, worker power may become important and management becomes more worker friendly and improves fire safety performance.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the garment factory owners and their management bodies for their co-operation to visit their factories. We also thank the Bangladesh Fire Service and Civil Defense Authority officials, their field inspectors and the experts for their continuous support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Integrated Energy Research, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK

    Zia Wadud

  2. Department of Civil Engineering, Military Institute of Science and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh

    Fuad Yasin Huda

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  1. Zia Wadud
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  2. Fuad Yasin Huda
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Correspondence to Zia Wadud.

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Wadud, Z., Huda, F.Y. Fire Safety in the Readymade Garment Sector in Bangladesh: Structural Inadequacy Versus Management Deficiency. Fire Technol 53, 793–814 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-016-0599-x

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