IFSECInsider-Logo-Square-23

Author Bio ▼

IFSEC Insider, formerly IFSEC Global, is the leading online community and news platform for security and fire safety professionals.
November 25, 2015

Download

Whitepaper: Enhancing security, resilience and efficiency across a range of industries

“Fire Protection Engineering was Unknown” in the Country: Meet the Man Protecting Factory Workers in Bangladesh

Rana plaza

Courtesy of rijans under CC2.0 licence

Brad Loewen boasts more than 30 years’ experience as a fire protection engineer in Canada.

Our sister site SHP Online, which reports on the health and safety industry, recently published the following interview with Loewen, who has described his latest role as the “key fire-protection engineering role in the world”. Below is the interview in full.

brad loewen

Brad Loewen

Brad Loewen is chief safety inspector for the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety. An independent agreement designed to make all garment factories in Bangladesh safe, the Accord came into being following the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in 2013 in which more than 1,100 people were killed and over 2,500 injured.

The Accord is a unique collaboration of over 200 apparel brands from 20 countries in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, as well as two global trade unions, eight Bangladeshi trade unions and four NGO witnesses.

The Accord is an independent, legally-binding agreement to work towards a safe and healthy garment manufacturing industry in Bangladesh, with improvements in fire safety and fire engineering among its goals.

Andy Cartland, founder and MD at Acre, the market leader in sustainability and safety recruitment, spoke to Brad about what may very well be the most challenging role in health and safety.

Andy Cartland: You’ve spent a large part of your career as a regulator in your native Canada, what attracted you to the Accord role?

Brad Loewen: Growing up I had been a little envious of those friends who had spent time working in international development overseas. At the time I was very involved in my local community. I was a volunteer fire fighter from the age of 16 and between that and then college, the opportunity just hadn’t presented itself. So when I saw the ad for this role, I just knew it was something I wanted to do.

AC: You were fighting fires at 16?

BL: Yes. I think the minimum age is now 18, but it’s from those early experiences that I became interested in fire protection. I went on to become the trainer in our department and when it came time to decide what to do at college, I opted for a degree in fire protection engineering at the University of Maryland.

AC: The tragedy at Rana Plaza made headlines around the world; did the high profile of the incident have a bearing on your decision to apply for the role?

BL: I doubt those terrible images will ever leave me and I’m sure the same is true of anyone who saw the footage of the disaster. There were two key questions being asked at the time: firstly, how could this have happened? And secondly, ‘how do we prevent this ever happening again?’

So when I first saw the role advertised, I was excited at the prospect of being able to use my skills and my experience as a regulator and enforcer of building and fire codes in a country where they were very much needed.

My first question however, was ‘Is it real?’ I didn’t want anything to do with a public relations exercise, so I didn’t apply for the role until I’d done enough research to satisfy myself that this was a genuine attempt to make things safer for garment workers in Bangladesh.

AC: As chief safety officer, you have around 1,600 factory buildings to inspect. Where do you start with a project so vast?

BL: As the Accord’s first employee, I just had to start at the beginning. Although we had the agreement, there was no standard for buildings to be assessed against. I met with lots of people and groups who had shared concerns about the situation and we drafted a standard. Then I did the easy part – I adopted the standard.   When you’re a one-person standards organisation this is by far the most straightforward piece of the puzzle. Once the standard was adopted, I was able to start evaluating the buildings.

AC: How long did that evaluation process take?

BL: Every factory under the Accord had been evaluated by September 2014 – a year and four months after the Rana Plaza collapse. Time was of the essence and there was no way that I could personally inspect all 1,600 buildings, so I hired consultant engineers to assist. That gave me time to focus on the next challenge, which was to develop the necessary protocols and reporting structures to ensure remediation.

AC: How important has it been to recruit locally?

BL: The plan has always been to ensure that the Accord leaves a legacy. If we had come here in 2013 and helicoptered in a group of international contractors it might have worked in the short term, it probably would have made for a nice story, but it wouldn’t have kept the millions of people who work in the garment trade safe over the long term.

We want to leave a legacy in the form of skills, so we prioritise local recruitment and now have a team of over 100 engineers and trainers. Fire protection engineering was unknown in Bangladesh until the Accord, but now all of the remediation work we do with factory owners is done by Bangladeshi engineers.

AC: Do you have a vision for the end of the project?

BL: The vision is that all 1,600 factory buildings under the Accord will be safe places to work, the systems we’ve introduced will ensure that safety standards will be maintained and each factory will have an occupational safety and health committee.

AC: You’ve achieved a huge amount in the 20 or so months you’ve been in post, what’s the next challenge?

BL: The next challenge is setting up the occupational safety and health committees at each factory producing for Accord brands. These committees, which will be made up of elected employees and managers, will be able to monitor and address safety and health issues on a day-to-day basis. They’re absolutely key to ensuring that the aims of the Accord continue to be realised after the five-year agreement. However, to achieve this, we first have to overcome the resistance to worker organisation that’s prevalent in Bangladesh. And that is most certainly a challenge.

AC: What advice would you give to fellow health and safety professionals?

BL: Be an expert but don’t act like an expert. Don’t bring your knowledge to the situation before you’ve had time to determine what’s going on and the only way to do that is to listen first. Throughout my career, I’ve found that offering people a sympathetic ear is usually the quickest way to get positive results.

 

 

 

Subscribe to the IFSEC Insider weekly newsletters

Enjoy the latest fire and security news, updates and expert opinions sent straight to your inbox with IFSEC Insider's essential weekly newsletters. Subscribe today to make sure you're never left behind by the fast-evolving industry landscape.

Sign up now!

man reading a tablet, probably the IFSEC Global newsletter

Related Topics

Subscribe
Notify of
guest
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments