Rana Plaza collapse

Cracks aired on TV the night before. Refuse the shift, lose a month's pay. They went in.

Documented, foreseeable risks that were ignored anyway. The failure is attention, not information.

Room: Q1 Predictable
Year: 2013
Impact: 1,134 lives
Sector: Garment manufacturing
Region: Asia-Pacific
Category: Societal

Why this room

Rana Plaza sits in the Predictable quadrant because the hazard was identified, documented and publicly broadcast before it materialised. Structural cracks were found on 23 April 2013, the building was evacuated, the bank and ground-floor shops closed, and the defect was shown on national television. Every party with authority to stop production held the information. What overrode it was the incentive structure: the owner declared the building safe, and factory management reportedly threatened to withhold a month's wages from workers who did not return. The collapse required no new information, only the willingness to act on information already in hand - the defining signature of q1, where the failure is attention and incentive rather than foresight.

The record

The eight-storey building collapsed on 24 April 2013 at about 08:57 local time; the search ended after 19 days on 13 May 2013 with a confirmed death toll of 1,134 and approximately 2,500 injured rescued.certain
The structure was permitted for shops and offices; four additional floors (5-8) were added without permits, and it was loaded with heavy garment machinery and rooftop diesel generators it was never designed to carry.high
Large cracks were discovered and televised on 23 April 2013, the day before the collapse; the bank and lower-floor shops closed, but garment workers were ordered back the next morning, with management at Ether Tex reportedly threatening to withhold a month's pay from anyone who refused.high
Approximately 3,122 workers were inside across five garment factories at the moment of collapse, and at least 29 global brands had orders with those factories.medium
The ILO-chaired Rana Plaza Donors Trust Fund, established January 2014, reached its USD 30 million target on 8 June 2015, more than two years after the collapse; by April 2015 over 2,800 claimants had received awards covering about 70% of the total.certain

Sources

The book

This entry is one of 111 in the register. The full story, and what it cost the people who lived it, is in Risky Business by Claudia Zeisberger, David Munro and Joanna Reijgersberg-Siew.

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