Fire
At about 16:00 on May 10, 1993, a small fire was discovered on the first floor of part of the E-shaped building. This portion of the building was used to package and store finished products, meaning there was a significant amount of fuel load present. Fuel loads composed of fabrics, plastics, materials used for stuffing, and additional workplace materials were found in each building of the Kader facility. Workers located in the upper floors were told the fire was minor and were instructed to keep working. The fire alarm in the building did not sound. Areas dedicated to storing finished products caused the fire to spread quickly. Other parts of the factory were full of raw materials which also burned very fast.
Workers in the Building One who tried to escape found the ground floor exit doors to be locked, and the stairwells soon collapsed on top of the workers due to the fire. Many workers jumped from the second, third, and fourth-floor windows in order to escape the flames, resulting in severe injuries and fatalities. Local security guards attempted to put out the flames, but were unsuccessful. A call was made to the local Nakhon Pathom Fire Department at 16:21.
Firefighters arrived at the factory at about 16:40 and found Building One nearly ready to collapse. Rapid spread of the fire due largely to the many flammable materials stored within contributed to the building’s collapse at 17:14, just 53 minutes after the fire department was called.
Fire alarms in Buildings Two and Three had sounded and all workers inside were able to escape before flames spread to the buildings. The fire brigades from Nakhon Pathom and neighboring Bangkok were able to extinguish the fires before these two buildings were destroyed.
Even with the help of hydraulic cranes, it took several days to remove all of the bodies of the victims left in the rubble of Building One.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, on Saturday, March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers – 123 women and girls and 23 men – who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, falling, or jumping to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Italian or Jewish immigrant women and girls aged 14 to 23; of the victims whose ages are known, the oldest victim was 43-year-old Providenza Panno, and the youngest were 14-year-olds Kate Leone and Rosaria "Sara" Maltese.
On Monday, December 1, 1958, a fire broke out at Our Lady of the Angels School in Chicago, Illinois, shortly before classes were to be dismissed for the day. The fire originated in the basement near the foot of a stairway. The elementary school was operated by the Archdiocese of Chicago and had an enrollment of approximately 1600 students. A total of 92 pupils and 3 nuns ultimately died when smoke, heat, fire, and toxic gases cut off their normal means of egress through corridors and stairways. Many more were injured when they jumped from second-floor windows which, because the building had a raised basement, were nearly as high above ground as a third floor would be on level ground.
The Garley Building fire took place on 20 November 1996 in the 16-storey Garley commercial building located at 232–240 Nathan Road, Jordan, Hong Kong. It was a catastrophe that caused 41 deaths and 81 injuries. It is considered the worst building fire in Hong Kong during peacetime. The fire damaged the bottom two floors and the top three floors of the building, while the middle floors remained relatively intact.
The Pemberton Mill was a large factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts. It suddenly collapsed and occupants were crushed or burned alive on January 10, 1860, in what has been called "the worst industrial accident in Massachusetts history" and "one of the worst industrial calamities in American history." An estimated 88 to 145 workers were killed and 166 injured.
Edifício Praça da Bandeira, formerly known as the Joelma Building, is a 25-story building in downtown São Paulo, Brazil, completed in 1971, located at Avenida 9 de Julho, 225. On 1 February 1974, an air conditioning unit on the twelfth floor overheated, starting a fire. Because flammable materials had been used to furnish the interior, the entire building was engulfed in flames within twenty minutes. Of the 756 people occupying the building at the time, 179 were killed and 300 injured.
Sam Phran is the southernmost district (amphoe) of Nakhon Pathom province, Thailand.
Kader Industrial Company Limited was founded in Hong Kong in 1948 by Ting Hsiung Chao. It was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 1985 and presently trades under the name of "Kader Holdings Company Limited".
Progressive collapse is the process where a primary structural element fails, resulting in the failure of adjoining structural elements, which in turn causes further structural failure.
The Grover Shoe Factory disaster was an industrial explosion, building collapse and fire that killed 58 people and injured 150 when it leveled the R. B. Grover shoe factory in Brockton, Massachusetts on March 20, 1905. Following a boiler explosion, the four-story wooden building collapsed and the ruins burst into flames, incinerating workers trapped in the wreckage.
The September 11 attacks of 2001 caused the deaths of 2,996 people, including 2,977 victims and 19 hijackers who committed murder–suicide. Thousands more were injured, and long-term health effects have arisen as a consequence of the attacks. New York City took the brunt of the death toll when the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan were attacked, with an estimated 1,600 victims from the North Tower and around a thousand from the South Tower. Two hundred miles southwest in Arlington County, Virginia, another 125 were killed in the Pentagon. The remaining 265 fatalities included the ninety-two passengers and crew of American Airlines Flight 11, the sixty-five aboard United Airlines Flight 175, the sixty-four on American Airlines Flight 77 and the forty-four who boarded United Airlines Flight 93. The attack on the World Trade Center's North Tower single-handedly made 9/11 the deadliest act of terrorism in human history.
The Brown Building is a ten-story building that is part of the campus of New York University (NYU), which owns it. It is located at 23–29 Washington Place, between Greene Street and Washington Square East in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, and is best known as the location of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25 1911, which killed 146 people.
The 1913 Binghamton factory fire occurred on July 22, 1913, on the premises of the Binghamton Clothing Company, in Binghamton, New York. It destroyed the Wall Street building in less than 20 minutes, killing 31 of the more than 100 people inside. Though not as deadly as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, it put even more pressure on New York officials to strengthen life safety codes, increase funding for more inspectors, and increase penalties for violations.
The Sennichi Department Store Building fire occurred in Sennichimae, Minami-ku, Osaka, Japan on May 13, 1972. The fire killed at least 118 people and injured another 78. It was the worst department store fire in terms of casualties in Japan. The building that housed the department store also contained various other businesses, including a cabaret. All of the victims had been in the cabaret.
The collapse of the Royal Plaza Hotel occurred on 13 August 1993 in the city of Nakhon Ratchasima (Korat) in Thailand, killing 137 people and injuring 227. Taking just less than 10 seconds, the building collapsed and transformed the 6-storey complex into a pile of rubble, leaving only the front elevator hall which was separately built from the rest of the structure. Gradual deformation due to creep weakened all the ground floor support columns and when one failed the rest rapidly followed, resulting in an almost complete vertical collapse. Several people were rescued from the rubble and trapped victims called for help using mobile phones. Violation of safety regulations and an unprofessional approach on the part of the engineer were deemed to be the cause of the disaster. Police arrested the owner of the building and five others. Rescue operations continued for more than 20 days, until 3 September. It is one of the most fatal and disastrous man-made accidents in Thai history.
Factories in Pakistan's two largest cities of Karachi and Lahore caught fire on 11 September 2012. The fires occurred in a textile factory in the western part of Karachi and in a shoe factory in Lahore. The fires are considered to be the most deadly and worst industrial factory fires in Pakistan's history, killing 289 people and seriously injuring more than 600.
The Rana Plaza collapse was a structural failure that occurred on 24 April 2013 in the Savar Upazila of Dhaka District, Bangladesh, where an eight-story commercial building called Rana Plaza collapsed. The search for the dead ended on 13 May 2013 with a death toll of 1,134. Approximately 2,500 injured people were rescued from the building. It is considered the deadliest accidental structural failure in modern human history, the deadliest garment-factory disaster in history and the deadliest industrial accident in the history of Bangladesh.
The ICTI Ethical Toy Program (IETP) is an independent, not-for-profit organisation established in 2004 to safeguard and improve ethical and sustainability standards in the global toy industry supply chain.
