With yet another devastating fire claiming at least nine lives at the time of writing this editorial, all the questions regarding fire safety must once again be brought forward. The fact that this latest fire once again had a chemical godown in Mirpur is unfortunately unsurprising; too often, it is fires involving chemicals that are hardest to bring under control, and that devastate and claim most lives.
At this point, these recurring fire disasters in Dhaka and also across the rest of the country are not and have never been acts of fate — instead, time and time again, these have been the consequences of systemic failure.
In 2024 alone, nearly 27,000 fires erupted nationwide, claiming at least 140 lives — a toll driven overwhelmingly by preventable causes — like the storage of flammable materials in densely populated buildings that appears to be a recurring pattern.
At the heart of it is the gross lack of accountability from the powerful individuals responsible for having these hazardous conditions in these buildings to begin with, and is compounded by our unplanned urbanization, where commercial and residential spaces are haphazardly mixed, and fire exits, sprinkler systems, and emergency protocols are treated as afterthoughts.
These fires continue to expose a governance vacuum where safety regulations only exist in writing but are routinely ignored in practice, leading to a vicious cycle that sees us have dozens of fire incidents daily in the country.
However, this is a cycle we must break. To do so, we must move beyond reactive firefighting to pro-active fire prevention. There are too many high-risk buildings in this city that are simultaneously filled with dangerous materials — and we need officials to be empowered with legal authority to shut down such structures and hold the owners accountable.
Without structural reform, our capital and the rest of the country will continue to burn — one factory, one warehouse, one life at a time.
