Bangladesh authorities accused a container depot operator of not telling firefighters about a chemical stockpile before it exploded with devastating consequences, killing at least 49 people — nine of them from the fire service.
The huge blast followed a fire at the BM Container Depot in Sitakunda, 40 kilometres from the south-eastern port city of Chittagong, and sent fireballs into the sky.
The death toll was expected to rise further as some containers were still smouldering on Monday, more than 36 hours after the explosion, preventing rescuers from checking the area around them for victims.
Around a dozen of the 300 injured were in critical condition and were flown to the capital, Dhaka.
The fire has been largely brought under control but not entirely extinguished. Nearby containers loaded with chemicals pose a risk of life-threatening explosions, fire officials have said.
“Our firefighters are working hard but due to the presence of chemicals, it is too risky to work close by,” said fire service chief Anisur Rahman.
Similar explosions, some of which shattered the windows of buildings in the district, have already complicated the firefighters' task.
Troops have also joined the effort to prevent the spread of chemicals in nearby canals and along the Bay of Bengal coastline, officials said.
The tally included at least nine dead firefighters. Ten policemen were among the 50 rescuers injured, said city police official Alauddin Talukder.
The nine firefighters killed in the blast were the most the department has ever lost in a single incident in the industrial-accident-prone country, where safety standards are lax and corruption often enables them to be ignored.
Two more firefighters are among several people still missing, officials said.
“Never in the history of the fire department, have so many firefighters died,” said Purnachandra Mutsuddi, who led the firefighting effort at the 26-acre depot on Saturday night.
The depot “didn't have any fire safety plan”, he told AFP on Monday, and it did not inform the firefighters about the chemicals, specifically the presence of hydrogen peroxide, which was stored on site.
“If they did, the casualties would have been much less,” he said.
More deaths are feared as some of the injured are in critical condition, said Chittagong doctor Mohammed Hossain.
The cause of the blaze was not immediately clear. However, fire officials suspect it could have started in a container of hydrogen peroxide before spreading quickly.
“Almost all the containers with exportable and imported goods were burnt,” said Ruhul Sikder, secretary of the Bangladesh Inland Container Depots Association.
At the depot were about 800 containers filled with exportable items, about 500 with imported items and about 3,000 that were empty, Mr Sikder said, quoting officials of the shipping centre, BM Container Depot.
“Some 85 per cent of the total exportable goods were ready-made garments,” he said.
The privately owned shipping depot has promised compensation of a million taka ($11,000) to the family of each worker killed in the fire.
Bangladesh has become the world's second-biggest exporter of garments in recent decades, but its infrastructure for, and focus on, industrial safety are still poor, the International Labour Organisation said this year.
In 2020, three people were killed when an oil tank exploded at a container depot in Chittagong's Patenga area.
Fifty-four people died last July in a blaze at a food-processing factory outside the capital, Dhaka.
In 2019, 70 people were killed in a fire that engulfed several buildings in a centuries-old district of the capital.
