At least five people have died and up to 40 were injured after the roof of a partially built cement factory collapsed Thursday afternoon in southwestern Bangladesh, a local police chief told CNN.
It was unknown how many people might still be trapped under rubble. Bagerhat District Police Chief Nizamul Haque Molla declined to give a number of those who are not accounted for, noting that emergency and rescue operations were still going on.
The collapse took place around 2 p.m. (4 a.m. ET) in Mongla, a port city in the Asian nation’s Bagerhat District.
Video from Boishakhi TV showed medical workers tending to the injured as they were wheeled into a local medical facility caked in dust.
Deadly incidents at factories and other buildings, sadly, are nothing new in Bangladesh.
The worst happened on April 24, 2013, when a nine-story building that housed five garment factories collapsed. Rescuers managed to save the lives of more than 2,400 people, but more than 1,100 died in the horrific accident.
And a November 2012 apparel factory fire on Dhaka’s outskirts killed at least 117 people, some of whom jumped from the building to escape the flames. Most of the dead were women, almost half of them burned so badly that DNA tests were needed to identify them.
That blaze led to convictions of 13 people for gross negligence of safety measures and spurred widespread criticism about the state of workers’ rights in Bangladesh.
The government responded by revamping laws so that workers no longer need approval from employers to form trade unions, and every factory that sells within the country also has to pledge 5% of their profits toward a workers’ welfare fund. The government also boosted minimum wages from $38 to around $68 per month.
Yet this hasn’t stopped more deadly incidents, including the January deaths of at least 13 people when a fire broke out inside a Dhaka factory.