A fire raced through densely packed buildings in a centuries-old shopping district in Bangladesh’s capital, killing at least 81 people, officials and witnesses said yesterday.
The fire in Dhaka’s Chawkbazar area was mostly under control after more than 10 hours of firefighting efforts.
Some of the about 50 people injured were critically burned.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The district dating to the Mughal era 400 years ago is crammed with buildings separated by narrow alleys, with residences commonly above shops, restaurants or warehouses on the ground floors. People throng to Chawkbazar each year for traditional goods to celebrate iftar, the end of Ramadan.
The blaze started late on Wednesday night in one building, but quickly spread to others, fire department Director-General Brigadier General Ali Ahmed said.
Many of the victims were trapped inside the buildings, said Mahfuz Riben, a control room official of the Fire Service and Civil Defense in Dhaka.
Photo: AP
“Our teams are working there, but many of the recovered bodies are beyond recognition. Our people are using body bags to send them to the hospital morgue. This is a very difficult situation,” he said by telephone.
Fire service Director Major AKM Shakil Newaz said that 70 dead had been recovered and were taken to Dhaka Medical College Hospital. Ambulances were arriving carrying bodies and relatives were mourning in front of the morgue.
First responders were delayed reaching the site in part because roads were closed for national holiday commemorations.
Just after midnight as the fire blazed, Bangladesh’s prime minister and president laid wreaths at a monument less than 1.3km away to commemorate protesters who died in a 1952 demonstration for the right to speak Bengali.
Fire officials said the road closures worsened traffic, slowing down some of the fire trucks rushing to the site.
Most buildings in Chawkbazar are used both for residential and commercial purposes despite warnings of the potential for high fatalities from fires after one had killed at least 123 people in 2010.
Authorities had promised to bring the buildings under regulations and remove chemical warehouses from the residential buildings.
A government eviction drive in Chawkbazar and other areas of Old Dhaka was met with protests in May last year right before Eid by business owners and residents.
Md. Manjur Morshed, an assistant professor of urban planning at Khulna University of Engineering and Technology, said that government regulations are routinely flouted in Chawkbazar.
“This is a historic area with a distinct culture,” he said. “They are not really abiding by the government’s rules.”
Such tragedies are common in Bangladesh, where fires, floods, ferry sinkings and other disasters regularly claim dozens of lives.
The death toll from the latest fire could still rise as the condition of some of the injured people was critical, hospital burns unit head Samanta Lal Sen said.
Witnesses told local TV stations that many gas cylinders stored in the buildings continued to explode one after another, adding that the fire also set off explosions in fuel tanks of some of the vehicles that got stuck in traffic in front of the destroyed buildings.
Some reports suggested that many of the dead were pedestrians, shoppers or diners who died quickly as several gas cylinders exploded and the fire engulfed the nearby buildings very quickly.
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