Following the disaster in Rana Plaza in April 2013, where a garment factory collapsed with the loss of 1,132 lives, Arup Ireland were asked to develop a methodology for assessing the structural safety of the garment factories in Bangladesh.
The objective of the Bangladesh project was to help ensure that there was no repeat of the Rana Plaza collapse. Arup Ireland came up with a pragmatic approach and developed a methodology that focused on critical life-safety issues.
The challenge was how to balance the immediate requirement of preventing another Rana Plaza without shutting down an entire industry which employs more than four million people and is critical to the national economy.
Their methodology has now been applied to over 2,500 factories in tandem with other structural consultants, all using the Arup methodology. The structural safety assessments are directly leading to safer workplaces for those employed in over 3,500 garment factories, ensuring that people feel safer going to work every day.