karail, fire
On Thursday, March 4, 2004, I went to visit the Karail slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which is located on a peninsula in a lake in the affluent Gulshan neighborhood. While I was there, a kitchen fire got out of hand and started to consume the shanties that were mostly made out of bamboo, card board and other highly combustible materials. With little space in between the houses, the fire spread as fast as lightning and within minutes, the entire peninsula was engulfed in flames. While most of the inhabitants could save themselves by fleeing into the surrounding lake, 25,000 people lost their homes and at least nine people, among them four children, died in the flames.