By Naimul Haq
Speaking to IPS from her hospital bed in the National Institute of Traumatology & Orthopaedic Rehabilitation (NITOR), 19-year-old Shapla, whose left arm was so badly injured that it had to be amputated on the site, recalled surviving for several hours squeezed between the second and third stories of the building, “with blood and corpses all around.”
Shapla’s husband, Mehedul, who worked as a sewing operator on the same floor, told IPS he survived by sheer luck, as he had been at the back of building at the moment the massive structure pitched forward.
Most of those working at the front of the building were crushed under the full weight of falling concrete slabs and crumbling walls.
Others, like 21-year-old Razia, say it is too painful to go on. “Someone give me poison. I want to die,” she cried out in the hospital ward where she and 121 other survivors are being treated free of cost.
She told IPS she and a few other girls had been “gossiping about the previous day’s decision to keep the factory open,” despite large cracks appearing on the pillars the day before. The next minute she heard what sounded like a huge explosion; then everything went dark.
For the next 14 hours, she struggled to breathe through the thick dust that hung around her.
In the hospital bed beside her lies Shamsul Alam, a 28-year-old quality inspector whose doctors say his spinal injuries are “too dangerous to operate on” and may end up being fatal.
Though he has not been informed of their bleak diagnosis, he told IPS he now “knows what its like to be in a coffin”, explaining the helplessness of being trapped and listening to people die around you.
