By Ben Tobias
Monday June 6, 2022
A fire and a huge explosion have killed at least 49 people
and injured hundreds more at a storage depot near the city of Chittagong,
Bangladesh.
Hundreds of people had arrived to tackle the fire when a
number of shipping containers exploded at the site in Sitakunda.
It is thought that chemicals were stored in some of the
containers.
Industrial fires are common in Bangladesh, and are often blamed
on poor safety regulations.
Many of the injured are said to be in a critical condition
and the number of people killed is expected to rise.
Hospitals in the area are overwhelmed, with crowds of people
waiting in hallways for treatment. Medics have appealed for blood donations and
some of the injured have been airlifted to the capital, Dhaka.
Parts of the depot were still on fire on Sunday
The fire broke out at around 21:00 local time (15:00 GMT) on
Saturday and hundreds of firefighters, police and volunteers quickly arrived on
the scene.
As they tried to extinguish the blaze a huge explosion
rocked the site, engulfing many of the rescuers in flames and throwing debris
and people into the air.
"The explosion just threw me some 10 metres from where
I was standing. My hands and legs are burnt," lorry driver Tofael Ahmed
told AFP news agency.
Volunteers, some wearing only sandals on their feet,
continued to bring bodies from the smouldering wreckage on Sunday morning.
Pictures of the aftermath showed the twisted remains of
metal shipping containers and the collapsed roof of a warehouse. A local
journalist told the BBC that there was a pungent odour in the air.
At least five firefighters were killed in the blast and several
more were injured. Many people are still missing, including journalists who
were reporting on the fire before the explosion.
The blast was so large it was heard several kilometres away
and shattered the windows of nearby buildings. One local shopkeeper told
reporters that a piece of debris had flown half a kilometre and landed in his
pond. He described seeing "fireballs falling like rain" after the
explosion.
Bodies were still being taken from the scene on Sunday
Many people in Bangladesh are comparing the explosion to the
huge blast that hit Beirut in 2020, said the BBC's Akbar Hossain in Dhaka. He
said people had reported hearing the blast from 30-40km (19-25 miles) away.
Firefighters were still struggling to put out the fire on
Sunday, with continued explosions making it more difficult, according to fire
officials.
The army has deployed sandbags to prevent chemicals flowing
into the Indian Ocean.
The storage site held around 4,000 containers
Around 4,000 containers were stored at the depot in
Sitakunda, which is 40km (25 miles) from Chittagong - Bangladesh's main sea
port and second-largest city. Sitakunda acts as a transit point for goods
travelling through the port.
A regional government official said the depot contained
millions of dollars of garments waiting to be exported to Western retailers.
Bangladesh is a major supplier of clothing to the West and
has prospered over the past decade to become the world's second largest
exporter of garments.
But safety regulations are often ignored or poorly enforced,
and there have been several large fires and other incidents at factories in
recent years.
On Sunday, the Dhaka Tribune newspaper published a list of
12 industrial disasters - including fires, building collapses and chemical
leaks - that have killed over 1,000 people since 2005.