Rana Plaza

Cracks were found in the pillars of the eight-storey building on the twenty-third of April and it was inspected and evacuated. The shops and the bank on the lower floors stayed closed the next morning.

The garment factories above did not. Workers were told the building was safe, and that they would lose a month's pay if they did not come in. They went up the stairs past the cracks.

At about a quarter to nine the power went out and the diesel generators on the upper floors started. The building came down within minutes.

One thousand one hundred and thirty-four were killed and about two and a half thousand hurt, most of them young women. The clothing labels found in the rubble were familiar in every high street in Europe and America.

Local volunteers dug with hand tools for nineteen days. A woman named Reshma Begum was brought out alive on the seventeenth.