Questioning fire safety in factories

Last Tuesday I was delivering some ETI training at a company in Sheffield, just at the same time as a fire was ripping through the Aswad Composite Mill in Gazipur, near Dhaka. It was not a fashion company, and just starting on the ethical trade journey, but the company’s purchasing manager asked a very pertinent question: “How far down the supply chain do we need to go?”

The Aswad factory was not producing garments but providing fabric to garment factories, and was not included in the recently published list of factories supplying the brands signed up to the Bangladesh Safety Accord. In South Asia, a composite mill usually means a factory involved in several processes including spinning, weaving and sometimes dyeing – and the fire is reported to have started in the dyeing section – which would have had plenty of chemicals.

The Accord has just got going and it is a remarkable achievement to have shared and published the factory data. Clearly, suppliers further down the supply chain will have to be tackled and the same principle of transparency would help. If factories supplying the Accord – as well as brands who often specify the fabric suppliers – can share data, it will be easier to exert leverage over those factories. But many of these will be outside Bangladesh. Fires and building collapses are common in India - a big supplier of fabric to Bangladesh.

Last December, after the Tazreen fire in Dhaka and the Ali fire in Karachi I gave a talk to ETI members about fires and safety in South Asia. So here is a run through again of a few points. There are three questions we need to ask:

• Why do fires start?

• Why do they spread?

• Why can’t workers get out in time?

Why do fires start?

The main cause of fires in factories (and lots of other buildings) in south Asia is electrical. The equipment is often sub-standard in the first place, and not well maintained. Massive fluctuations in power supply and frequent “load shedding” (power cuts to you and me) damages equipment. And a major factor is over-loading.  Those extra floors built illegally means more sewing machines, and they all need bidyut (electricity). The transformer can’t cope with the load, and the circuit breaker has been by-passed so WHAM – an explosion.

Why do fires spread?

So you have a fire.  It needs fuel.  Garment factories tend to have fabric about the place – that’s a good fuel. Dyes are another great fuel. Logically, if you keep these away from the most likely source of ignition, that will help stop fires from spreading. But reports consistently show that rooms with transformers are used as stores. They should of course be housed well away from likely fuel and the walls sprinkled with stone dust (a trick they use in coal mines to guard against explosions).

So, you put some nice fabric next to the transformer and it’s on fire. The heat has already broken the windows and now smoke is pouring out of the windows and the door that was not fire- and explosion- proof.  It’s starting to go up the staircases. Never mind, you have fire doors in place and smoke vents. And the sprinkler system has kicked in. The smoke will be contained and the fire out soon.

But this is Bangladesh, or India, or Pakistan and factories seem to have been designed to help fire and smoke spread quickly; staircases in most factories are like motorways for smoke to rush up. And sprinklers? That means a lot of expense. And it would mean a big water tank at the top of the building. We could fit a few more sewing machines in that space.

So fires spread because they are given fuel and there are rarely effective measures in place to prevent the spread.

By this time the fire has got established and people are starting to breathe in smoke. Everybody knows that smoke kills more people than fire.

In the factories I have visited there is usually a lovely photo album that shows people demonstrating the use of fire extinguishers: a waste of time. They are handy maybe for a small scale fire; they will not stop the killer fire that will feature in newspapers all over the world - unless the factory can be evacuated quickly and safely.

Why can’t workers get out in time?

Auditors have been checking fire drills for years. BGMEA has had a programme about fire drills for years. Still workers cannot get out. There is a key concept in safety – the hierarchy of control. The focus of audit programmes and the BGMEA fire safety programme was fire drills and evacuation. It’s like giving people who work next to a noisy machine ear muffs, when making the machine quieter is the best way to reduce hearing loss. Likewise – stop the fire in the first place, or stop if from spreading.

Back to evacuating the factory. There are two problems. First off, there are just not enough exits. Don’t forget, smoke is pouring up one of the staircases. What we need are the external staircases that you see in all those films set in New York. They are there because of the famous Shirtwaist Triangle factory fire a century ago.

Secondly, the drills are just not realistic enough. They are a tamasha – a show, an entertainment. Everybody troops towards the fire exit, and then it’s back to work. Fire drills can and should be much more challenging and realistic.

Of course, if fire alarms are switched off, or workers told to go on working even when they smell smoke, then a safe evacuation is never going to happen. We know that happened last December when 112 workers were killed at the Tazreen fire.

The Accord contains a clause for Safety Committees, with genuine worker representation, and making this work will be crucial. Worker members of the committees need to be taught in depth about fire, and to carry out their own inspections. There is an important clause in the Accord “to respect the right of a worker to refuse work that he or she has reasonable justification to believe is unsafe”. That means getting out quickly, whatever the boss says. Workers need to be able to use that clause. No worker empowerment = more deaths.

Fire and building safety is not just a technical challenge. It is about empowering workers.