Last Hope in Ruins: Bangladesh’s Race to Save Shaheena
JIM YARDLEY
SAVAR, Bangladesh — The rescuers discovered her by a faint, distant
sound. They had spent four days crawling through the wreckage of Rana
Plaza, tons of concrete and steel pressing down, saving hundreds of
people. Now only the dead remained. Except for a lone woman, a garment
worker.
Taslima Akhtfer for The New York Times
Jesmine Akhtar with Robin, the son of her sister, Shaheena, in Bangladesh.
She was trapped behind a fallen pillar, in a suffocating crevice maybe
two feet high. First, the rescuers could see only her fingertips
pressing through a tiny opening. After hours spent chipping a small
hole, they could see her face. Her name was Shaheena. She was 32. She
begged to see her young son.
The story of Shaheena, involving a heroic if ultimately doomed rescue
operation, offered the last bit of hope of finding anyone alive in what
is now considered the deadliest accident in the history of the garment
industry. For hours on April 28, as television reporters broadcast
updates, rescuing Shaheena became a national priority. She would be
trapped for more than 100 hours.
Her plight attracted so much attention because of the horror of the
building collapse, with a death toll that by Sunday had exceeded 600;
the drama of the long rescue effort; and the human desire to find a
sliver of redemption in the tragedy. But the attention was also an
anomaly: there are easily more than 2.5 million women working in the
garment industry in Bangladesh whose lives usually attract scant notice,
even though they are the workhorses of the national economy.
For women like Shaheena, the garment industry has been a source of
empowerment as well as exploitation. Before, few rural women worked
outside the fields in Bangladesh, a predominantly Muslim nation. Many,
like Shaheena, are still not given a surname at birth. Now the industry
has given many women a first step out of rural distress, with some
becoming outspoken labor leaders or managers in their factories.
But more often, a factory job has meant a daily struggle to subsist on
low wages consumed by rising rents and living expenses. The day before
Rana Plaza collapsed on April 24, the five factories inside the building
were temporarily closed when cracks were discovered in the structure.
But relatives say Shaheena insisted on returning to work at her factory,
Phantom Tec, even as her brother-in-law warned that the building might
be unsafe.
“If I don’t go to work tomorrow, I’ll be absent, and I will not get paid
for the day,” Shaheena said that afternoon, according to her sister,
Jesmine Akhtar. “They may delay my month’s wages. I need to pay the
rent. I need to buy milk for my son.”
Her immediate concern was $25. She and her son had lived with her
sister’s family in an area called Mojidpur. They were seven people
sharing two small rooms with a monthly rent of $56. Even that was too
much, so the families found a place for $38 a month. Everyone had moved
except Shaheena; she still needed to find $25 for her share of the
advance.
Her family said that her job had given Shaheena a sense of independence.
She gave herself a surname, the same as her sister’s. She left her
husband when she was three months pregnant with her son, Robin, because,
her family said, he mistreated her. Yet that meant that she was now the
only breadwinner, despite earning barely $100 a month after a decade
working in factories.
“There were so many nights she worked even until midnight,” her sister recalled. “She needed money.”
The morning shift had barely started inside Rana Plaza on April 24 when
the building buckled. A day earlier, an engineer had examined the cracks
and warned that the building should stay closed, but the building’s
owner, Sohel Rana, and the factory bosses opened that morning, anyway.
Then entire factory floors collapsed, raining down concrete beams. Some
people died instantly. Others would lose hands or legs to amputation
during their rescue or afterward. And hundreds of others were trapped
alive, desperate for water in choking, triple-digit temperatures, and
desperate to be saved.
Khandoker A. Jalil, a senior station officer with the Bangladesh Fire
Service, led one rescue team. To reach survivors, rescue crews cut holes
in the fallen rooftop and began climbing down into the wreckage,
establishing tunnels and slithering through tiny crawl spaces created by
huge rolls of fabric that had blocked the collapsing beams.
Late on April 26, the third day of searching, Officer Jalil’s team
discovered 13 survivors, as well as some haunting sounds. “We heard some
people from the other side,” he recalled.
For more than a day, they would search for those voices, sliding through
narrow passages, cutting holes to lower floors. Finally, they reached a
crawl space barely 18 inches high, and the sound of the voices was
sharper.
“I asked, How many of you are there?” recalled Abu Yusef, one of the
firefighters. A woman answered: “There are four of us.”
Another firefighter, Abdur Rob, shined his flashlight beneath small
openings under the beam. Do you see a light? he asked. No, came the
answer. Here? No. And then, finally, yes. They slipped a wire through
the small crack below. Shaheena pulled back.
It was now early in the afternoon of April 27. Outside, officials were
readying heavy machinery to clear debris and reach the rest of the
bodies. But then word went to the rooftop: the last survivors had been
found.
Shaheena’s family had searched for her since the building had collapsed
but found nothing for four days. Then neighbors heard something on
television and contacted the family.
“We heard that the rescuers were trying to save her,” said her father,
Abdul Motaleb Golder, 72. “They said Shaheena wants to survive.”
Eventually, the three other trapped women would fall silent. But as
rescuers worked for more than 20 hours, Shaheena kept talking. “Her
concern was that during the last four days she couldn’t hold her baby,”
said Lt. Ashraful Alam Anik, one of the commandos involved in the rescue
operation. “She wanted to see her child.”
Robin, who is now 20 months old, spent most of his time with his aunt,
since his mother worked such long hours. On the night Robin was born,
Shaheena worked until hours before giving birth and then returned to the
sewing line two months later.
Shifts of rescuers changed, twice. The same firefighters who discovered
her returned on April 28 to try to finish digging her out. The fallen
pillar was embedded with iron rods, or rebar, that were difficult to cut
in such a cramped space. So the rescuers decided to chip away at the
bottom of the pillar, below the rods, and then try to cut a gap in the
floor below.
They pushed an oxygen tube through the opening, and used another tube to
give her saline, glucose and juice. When the hole expanded, they gave
her hard biscuits. When the heat became oppressive, they cooled her with
bursts from a high-pressure hose. At one point, she took a saw and
hammer and began working, too, lying on her back, barely able to
maneuver.
Finally, by the evening of April 28, the hole was nearly big enough.
Shaheena could slide her head through, rescuers said, but not her
shoulders and chest. Only a few rods in the flooring needed to be cut to
make room, a job that might take an hour. Outside, thousands of people
had gathered at the site as television reporters relayed the progress.
“The whole nation was looking for that lady,” said Maj. Mostafa Arif, an army officer involved in the operation.
Inside the wreckage, a civil engineer who had joined the rescue team
thought he could cut through the final iron rods with a small electric
grinder. A mistake. In the narrow crawl space, sparks splattered against
the rolls of fabric and the shirts strewn on the floor. Fire.
“The tunnel is dark,” recalled Capt. Mahmudul Hasan, another army
officer at the scene. “But suddenly we saw light coming at us.”
The rescuers scrambled up to the roof, some fainting from the smoke. The
civil engineer suffered severe burns and has since died. When the
rescuers later recovered her body, Shaheena was not burned; presumably
she died from smoke inhalation.
“We were so upset,” said Abdur Rob, the firefighter. “We had only 1
percent of the work to finish. But at the end, everything was ruined. We
broke into tears.”
Over the weekend, as work crews continued pulling out bodies, Jesmine
Akhtar held tightly to her sister’s only child. He is wide-eyed and
giggling and does not yet know that his mother is dead. “I will take
care of Robin,” his aunt declared. “I had three children. Now I have
four. He will be with me the rest of my life.”
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