Textile Industry Hit by Massive Fire at Bangladesh’s Dhaka Airport

A fire at Dhaka airport in Bangladesh has burned textile exports worth millions of dollars. The fire broke out on Saturday afternoon and authorities have opened an investigation, local media reported.

The fire destroyed storage areas used to store imported raw materials, export-ready garments and samples of products essential to Bangladesh’s textile industry, which generates, according to the latest estimates, $47 billion a year.

Bangladesh Textile Manufacturers and Exporters Association (Bgmea) senior vice president Haq Khan has regretted that the incident has caused “serious damage to the country’s export trade, especially textiles”.

Garments and sample products were destroyed in the fire

“High-value goods and urgent air shipments, including garments ready for shipment, raw materials for production and product samples, have been destroyed,“ he added. Every day, between 200 and 250 factories ship their products by air, which has skyrocketed the financial impact of the fire.

The association is assessing the extent of the losses and has requested a list of the damaged goods. The airport’s cargo terminal is one of the country’s busiest logistics centers, handling more than 600 tons of cargo a day, a figure that doubles during the peak export season between October and December.

As for the causes, hypotheses such as a short circuit in the warehouse’s electrical system or an explosion of flammable materials are being considered. The authorities have undertaken to reinforce security protocols at all airport facilities in the country, as this is the third major fire reported in Bangladesh in recent days.

Last Tuesday, a fire at a garment factory and an adjacent chemical warehouse in Dhaka killed at least 16 people and injured several others. Last Thursday, another fire destroyed a seven-story building of a textile factory in Chittagong.

Bangladesh is the world’s second largest exporter of garments after China. The sector, which supplies major international retailers such as Walmart, H&M and Gap, employs some 4 million workers and generates about $40 billion a year, accounting for more than a tenth of the country’s GDP.