Death toll from Bangladesh building collapse rises above 1,000

UPDATED: 03:03 AM EDT 05.10.13
More than two weeks after a building in Bangladesh housing factories
full of garment workers caved in, the death toll from the South Asian
nation's deadliest industrial disaster has surpassed 1,000,
authorities said Friday.
For the 17th day, rescue and recovery workers are searching through
the nine-story building's tangled wreckage in Savar, a suburb of the
capital, Dhaka. During the first several days of dangerous and
painstaking work, they got more than 2,400 people out of the rubble
alive.
But since then, they haven't found any more survivors. The past 11
days have focused on the grim task of retrieving dead bodies still
buried in the heap of broken concrete, many of them so severely
decomposed that authorities struggle to identify them.
As more bodies were recovered on Friday, the total number of people
confirmed dead rose to 1,039, said Maj. Zihadul Islam, a fire service
official.
The owners of the building and the factories are under investigation
over accusations they ordered workers to enter the premises on the day
of the collapse despite cracks in the structure the day before.
Lax safety standards
The Bangladeshi government has faced criticism for failing to improve
the lax safety standards in the country's thousands of garment
factories where millions of people work.
The Savar building collapse happened five months after a fire at a
garment factory near Dhaka killed more than 100 people. And on
Wednesday, eight people died in a fire at another factory in the Dhaka
area.
The European Union has threatened to take trade action against
Bangladesh if it doesn't take concrete steps to improve health and
safety conditions for workers.
Western retailers and clothing brands that source their products from
Bangladeshi factories are also under pressure to subject their supply
chains to greater scrutiny.
The grim search for bodies
At the site of the building collapse in Savar, the salvage operation
is in its final stage, using cranes and bulldozers to clear the rubble
and uncover the remaining bodies, the national news agency Bangladesh
Sangbad Sangstha (BSS) reported Thursday.
The smell of death continues to permeate the surrounding area,
prompting people passing by on a nearby highway to cover their noses,
BSS said. Recovery workers combing the debris have had to resort to
using face masks and cans of air freshener to try to block out the
stench.
Hundreds of people looking for their missing relatives are still
waiting by the grounds of a nearby school where retrieved bodies are
first taken for an initial attempt at identification. But the
decomposed state of the bodies often means they are unrecognizable.
Authorities have resorted to sending some of the remains to a Dhaka
hospital for DNA tests, BSS reported. The bodies are then buried
unidentified pending the results of the DNA tests.