GUEST DETAILS
Aidan Madden is a Chartered Civil/Structural Engineer with over twenty years' experience at global firm Arup, leading complex, impactful projects worldwide. Following the catastrophic Rana Plaza collapse in 2013, Aidan became a pivotal member of Arup's leadership team developing and implementing structural safety assessment methodology for the original Bangladesh Accord. This monumental effort required creating standardised yet highly rigorous technical frameworks to rapidly assess structural integrity of over 2,500 garment factories—demanding first-principles engineering judgement at unprecedented speed and scale. His work proved instrumental in identifying and remediating high-risk structural, electrical and fire hazards, effectively codifying ethical engineering practice for an entire global industry. For his extraordinary contribution to safety and social responsibility through engineering, Aidan received the prestigious Engineers Ireland International Engineer of the Year Award.
Connect with Aidan on LinkedIn

Colm Quinn is Head of Operations for the International Accord, a legally binding agreement focused on securing safe and healthy garment and textile industries worldwide. Leading implementation and operational rollout of Accord programmes across multiple countries including Pakistan expansion, Colm manages technical capacity-building initiatives training local engineers—structural, fire and electrical specialists—on rigorous safety standards necessary for factory inspections and remediation. Bringing strong high-level engineering foundations from previous work as Associate at global engineering firm Arup, Colm's career trajectory represents the crucial shift from developing pioneering safety frameworks to successfully scaling and sustaining them across global industries. His operational leadership ensures that technical rigour developed in Bangladesh translates effectively to new markets whilst empowering local engineering teams.
Connect with Colm on LinkedIn
 

MORE INFORMATION
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Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

QUOTES
"The fundamental problem was that a building which was designed to be a five story building, and by the time it collapsed in April of 2013 it was a nine storey building. So it had been overdeveloped. They had put on additional floors beyond what it had been designed for. You have a building which is heavier than it's supposed to be, and with concrete which is weaker than it should have been." - Aidan Madden

"There's kind of a bit of an art and a bit of science to this. We need to spend the time that we need to do the assessment, but we have to be able to do it at scale. A colleague of mine had a great phrase which we reused today: optimal ignorance. It's like, what do you really, really need to know to allow you to define the actions, to define the meaningful things that will happen after your visit to make those buildings safer." - Aidan Madden

"The programme is quite unique in that it's dealing with existing buildings. There's no code that I know where existing buildings are front and foremost. This is a problem not just in Asia. Engineers need to be retrained or refocused to deal with existing buildings. It's not a Bangladesh problem. It's not a Pakistan problem, it's an engineering problem" - Colm Quinn

"The Accord, combined with the RSC in Bangladesh, inspected over 2,000 factories and have identified over 140,000 individual health and safety findings, and of those, over 115,000 have been corrected." - Colm Quinn

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience here is an AI transcription 
Dusty Rhodes  0:03  
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes, and welcome to AMPLIFIED the Engineers Journal podcast.

Colm Quinn  0:08  
We worked with Arup to get our engineers in that mindset of dealing with existing buildings. It's not a Bangladesh problem. It's not a Pakistan problem, it's an engineering problem.

Dusty Rhodes  0:22  
Today we're chatting with two Irish engineers highly involved in literally redefining worker safety standards in the aftermath of one of the deadliest industrial disasters in modern times. They are a former Engineers Ireland Engineer of the Year, Aidan Madden from Arup, and Chartered Engineer and former Arup Associate who is now Head of Operations for the International Accord, Colm Quinn. Aidan and Colm, you're both very welcome. 

Aidan Madden  0:48  
Thanks to be here. Thank you.

Dusty Rhodes  0:50  
So Listen, guys. Our story today is quite a dramatic one. It stems from one of the deadliest industrial disasters in recent times, which happened 1000s of miles away from Ireland, but it's one in which you've both been intimately involved with in your careers. It happened at the Rana Plaza factory building in Dhaka in Bangladesh. Aidan, maybe, can you tell me, from a structural engineer's perspective, what was the fundamental problem with that building?

Aidan Madden  1:19  
Yeah, thanks, Dusty. So I suppose the fundamental problem there was that was a building which was designed to be a five story building, and by the time it collapsed in April of 2013 it was a nine story building. So in other words, it had been over developed. They had put on additional floors beyond what it had been designed for. And while I wouldn't be aware of the specifics, what I do know for a fact since then is that things like the concrete quality in Bangladesh at that time had been very poor. So you have a building which is heavier than it's supposed to be, and with concrete which is weaker than it should have been. And those two things together, at least, were significant players in the collapse that happened in back in 2013

Dusty Rhodes  2:10  
And I imagine that within the building, like a lot of buildings in Asia, tends to have retail on the ground, or the first two, three floors, and then you've got, like apartment buildings. If this place was a factory, I would imagine a lot of heavy equipment in the higher floors as well. Yeah, yeah,

Aidan Madden  2:26  
Yeah. The I suppose the garment factories, by their nature, you know, they are manufacturing industrial facilities. So in some cases, they will have heavy equipment throughout, distributed throughout the buildings. You know, they're producing large volumes of clothes for all of us, so they store quantities of raw materials and finished products. So there's a lot of storage, there's machinery, there's people, all of that contributes to the loads that the building experiences.

Dusty Rhodes  2:56  
So Aidan, then what happened the building? 

Aidan Madden  2:58  
So the building, it collapsed. And I suppose what we know from from reading reports at the time is that in the days leading up to that collapse, there were reports of, I suppose, some distress in the concrete structure that people had noticed and how that was acted on, I suppose, is a bit unclear. But ultimately, people were still working in that factory when it collapsed on the, I think it was the 24th of April, and unfortunately, you know, and tragically, that led to the loss of over 1200 lives, and that, I suppose, created the necessity for action

Dusty Rhodes  3:34  
exactly, all right, it was a huge international story, and it was a very, very long way away. How did you get involved in this ape? So

Aidan Madden  3:43  
from Arup perspective, we had actually been working, I suppose, a major client of ours from Spain, or an organization called Inditex, a garment brand. We had been working with them in Bangladesh in the previous year or so, helping them with some fire safety assessments and factories because they were concerned about fire safety issues in factories in Bangladesh. So once we're on a plaza happened, they turned to us and they asked us for our support to help them figure out how they were going to deal with this, this tragedy. And you know, how could they do something about that? So they asked us to figure out a way of starting to assess the factories in which they were sourcing garments from to understand, were there other Rana plazas out there, what was the physical state, the physical condition, the quality, the condition of the factories within which their products were being made? So we spent some time, you know, in that period, immediately after Rana Plaza, in the kind of the summer of 2013 we had a team from Dublin, Madrid, London, some other colleagues who got together to start to think about, how do you do something that's meaningful, but how do you create an inspection methodology which will provide some meaningful information? I. Quickly. And so what we have is we were trying to create a balance between going too deep, you know, and doing a very detailed analysis on each factory, versus doing something that was so light touch that it actually didn't provide any useful information. And so it was really this balance between getting meaningful, actionable information about things like fundamental decisions. Can this building remain in operation? Is it safe for this building to remain in operation? If so, what are the actions that need to be addressed? Do they, you know, what's the timeline within those actions need to be addressed? That was what we grappled with in those very early days back in 2013 and that led us, I suppose, to move on then to piloting that on the ground and then actually rolling that out, implementing that in the factories. 

Dusty Rhodes  5:50  
So tell me about the checks. I mean, how do you check? I mean, we're used to building checks, but how do you handle checking 1000s of buildings and checking them quickly.

Aidan Madden  6:00  
There's kind of a bit of an art and a bit of science, I guess, to some of this, and what we have to do is to try and combine both. And I think what you've what you've touched on there, is critical. Here is the scale of this. There are 1000s of buildings in Bangladesh, which is where we started, and 1000s of buildings, 10s of 1000s elsewhere in the world where these products are made. We need to spend the time that we need to do the assessment, but we have to be able to do it at scale, and that's the critical thing. So our approach was, I suppose, taking people who are trained in assessing existing buildings, providing them with some context specific information. So what's the Bangladeshi context? How are buildings built in Bangladesh in that time, what are the materials they're made out of? How can we quickly check that those materials are what they're supposed to be, comparing design drawings versus what's actually built and then doing some very I suppose, finding what do we determine to be like the critical life safety issues in a building, and then checking those specifically so in a Bangladeshi context, where we had these kind of multi-story factory buildings made out of reinforced concrete, generally, as I mentioned, sometimes with the poor concrete quality, we were very both interested in things which could fail brittley. So in other words, give you no warning. And so those were the things we were really focused on. So concrete columns became a really important checking concrete columns with enough science, enough engineering behind us, so we could, we could define kind of minimum levels of safety. And that became kind of the methodology. It was really been super focused on the critical life safety elements. And, you know, a colleague of mine had a great phrase, which we reused today, which is kind of optimal ignorance. It's like, what do you really, really need to know to allow you to define the actions, to define the meaningful things that will happen after your visit, to make those buildings safer. So that was our approach.

Dusty Rhodes  8:04  
Colm, while all this was going on, there was something going on up on a policy level, I suppose, where people were saying, we need to have some kind of an organization in place which is going to make sure that accidents like this do not happen again in the future. And international accord was born, who established and what's the purpose of it?

Colm Quinn  8:23  
The purpose, in my mind, is quite simple. It's to address life safety issues in in the supply chain, in garment factories. Really, really simple, and Aiden's touched on them, some of those life safety issues, the scope is broader now than than initially. So there was work in the background, kind of not so public, on establishing a program pre Rana Plaza. And the tragedy of Rana Plaza really kick started the Bangladesh accord, as it was at the time, and the program started from there.

Dusty Rhodes  8:54  
So tell me about the Accord today, then, because you're joining us from Pakistan, what is it you're doing? 

Colm Quinn  8:59  
So today, the Accord is based on Amsterdam, the International accord, and we are operating in Pakistan at the moment. That's our country specific safety program, as we call it. The work in Bangladesh continues that was taken over by an organization called the RSC. So it was in transition in 2020 from the Bangladesh accord to the RSC, and they fulfill the obligations of the brands in those countries, so ensuring worker safety, identifying and remediating safety issues in factories.

Dusty Rhodes  9:34  
I would imagine then that a large part of that solution is having to train local teams. Am I correct?

Colm Quinn  9:39  
Yeah, so the approach in Pakistan has been to build our team of engineers, which we've done over the past two years, and to kick start that program. When I worked for Arup, myself and Aidan and colleagues came to Pakistan a number of times. We carried out pilot inspections. We carried out initial inspections, which. Be full safety inspections of factories, but also we did those in conjunction with what were called at the time the new hires, which are now our engineers in Pakistan, doing that work of identifying safety issues and following through group remediation.

Dusty Rhodes  10:15  
So on a day to day basis, then what is it that you're doing Colm?

Colm Quinn  10:18  
I'll speak specifically about Pakistan, that's where we have our main operations. So we have a big focus on the moment on the engineering side, to do initial inspections, as Aidan mentioned, structural engineering, but we also inspect for fire, electrical and boiler safety engineering. Right now, we've inspected just over 300 factories. We are in the process of for those 300 factories of what we call the remediation phase. So after the initial inspection, we produce a an action plan for the factory which address the most serious life safety concerns in the factory. So as Aidan alluded to earlier, it's really just focused on life safety issues, so we then follow through with remediation monitoring that involves us going back to the factory on a periodic basis to monitor the progress of the factory as they deal with these issues.

Dusty Rhodes  11:14  
Colm, when you're working with local teams, how do you make sure? Because I'm sure lots of us listening. We live in a first world, Western world. Bangladesh is completely different. Is there a difference in the standard of engineering? And how do you get engineers to the standard you need them to be at? 

Colm Quinn  11:31  
I'll speak about the Accord and the engineers in the Accord, the program is quite unique in that it's dealing with existing buildings. There's no code that I know or have come across and Ed might correct me, where existing buildings are front and foremost in the code. This is a problem not just in Asia. We're dealing with existing buildings. Engineers need to be retrained or refocused to deal with the issues within existing buildings. As a an engineer myself, as a design engineer, myself, starting with a blank sheet of paper is I'm not saying it's easy, but it's easier to deal with a live, functioning full of workers, full of process building to try and remediate that that's quite difficult. It's true. Working on it, we worked with Arup to get our engineers in that mindset of dealing with existing, this stock of building. It's not a Bangladesh problem. It's not a Pakistan problem, it's an engineering problem.

Dusty Rhodes  12:27  
Colm, you're very much at the coal face of it. Aidan, you're kind of a bit more step because you're based in Dublin. Tell me why is Arup continuing to be involved in this project?

Aidan Madden  12:36  
Think we have very shared values, actually, in how we operate and how we think, like, the Accord mission, if you like, is about making workplaces safer for those workers. Like, that's what it's there to do. And I think within our own organization, our own kind of ethos or and values are are aligned to that. Our founder many, many years ago talked about things that were really important to him at the time, and one of the things he talked about was doing socially useful work, doing work that really has an impact, you know, has a direct impact. And, you know, strategies come and go, but today, our strategy and the company talks about making safer and more resilient places. And if this kind of work that we're doing in places like Bangladesh and Pakistan, isn't aligned to that. Well, I then, I don't know what is, I think it's the direct impact of the work. We see that as really important. I think my colleagues who've worked on this, and I would say there's, you know, we're probably numbering 200 people who've had an involvement in this since we started work with the Accords, they can see that, you know, and they recognize, and even those who aren't involved can recognize that this work matters, like for us as engineers, you know whether you know wherever you work, and whether you know part of our our profession is about, you know, is doing good, right? You know for others, and, you know, creating safer workplaces, I think, falls squarely into that we're only here as a support act really. You know, the the engineers who work for the Accord, who are out there every day like they're the ones who are really, you know, at the coalface, really live in this and we're here, or have been here, to support them and get them into a place where they can be really effective at their work and kind of applying their engineering skills, maybe in a different way, and I think that's what we've tried to bring to them over the last two years as part of our capacity building program.

Dusty Rhodes  14:31  
Aidan, considering that Colm is at the coalface, and you're back in Dublin, and you've got a better bird's eye view, can you give us some of the numbers that have been achieved over the years, like, how many factories have been checked, how many serious safety problems have been fixed, that kind of thing.

Aidan Madden 14:46  
I think Colm's probably going to be best placed. 

Dusty Rhodes  14:47  
Well, then Colm's, the better man go on. Colm hit me with numbers. 

Colm Quinn  14:52  
The accord, combined with the RC in Bangladesh, inspected over 2000 factories and have identified over 104 40,000 individual health and safety findings, and of those, over 115,000 have been corrected.

Dusty Rhodes  15:09  
They're the big numbers. Those are big numbers. So yeah, one to ask, I don't know which of you is the better one to answer, but what's the system? How do you go in, you know, as an engineer, and do this work at scale and at speed. What's your checklist? 

Colm Quinn  15:25  
The work has transitioned over the years from a very paper based take a picture on your phone, go back to the office and write a report. So in Pakistan and in Bangladesh, we're transitioning to a digital workflow, and we're joining up as many pieces as we can. So when the engineer stands in the factory, they've got a an iPad in their hand. When they take a picture, that picture goes on to our database, and we've taken a CRM or a customer relationship manager tool, and we've we've modified it, and we've highly modified it to be able to take just that raw data from an inspection, sort it out, into these actionable items for factories to deal with. So the issue identified, what the factory need to do, a picture of the issue like very, very simple action plan, taking that that becomes our database when we want to print the reports, again, a lot of work to get this done, but now we press a button and we print off a PDF of the report. Once that's that's the inspection phase, we have a it's the inspection and remediation process so but once the inspection is done, I don't know. Maybe that's 5% of the work. The rest of the work is after that. It's working with the factory for them to come up with plans, financial plans, engineering plans, products, effectively the solution. And we work with them. But as we're working with the factory, at the factory are asking us questions. We're getting them to update our database. We're giving them direct access to our database. So if they want to tell us, you know, we have a question, they ask the question in our database. It doesn't look like a database to them, but it's our database. If they want to submit drawings, they submit them, rather than through an email, they'll submit them into into the database. I think we've 650 factories, so we're pushing all that information into one place.

Dusty Rhodes  17:25  
It sounds like a very well honed system at this stage. Aiden, you would have been responsible, I guess, for helping to set up this system when, when you were thinking about it initially, what were the problems that you had to overcome?

Aidan Madden  17:36  
Yeah, I think the scale factor is really significant. You know, Colm talked about 650 factories in Pakistan alone. So which that turns into 650 remediation projects. So you have a program of works. So I suppose, going back to the initiation point, which is the initial inspections that you know, and which we've mentioned a bit, for those you know, we're the teams become very focused on the key safety issues. So the electrical safety, the fire safety, the boiler safety, the structural safety, because those are the things that we know cause life safety issues that cause people to either be killed or injured, the consequences of events caused by those you know an electrical safety issue, causes a fire and so on. In the designing the overall structure, the overall program, it's okay identify the issue, then what are you going to do about it? It's the what and the so what? What are the actions that need to be taken to address that particular safety issue? What are the reasonable timelines that you can take them in. What do you need to do now? What should you be doing in the medium term? And what's going to take a longer term action and making those actions specific, clear, time bound? Really? That that's the kind of fuel which enables the factories, you know, they own, the actions, ultimately, that enables them to actually deliver the solutions. And so then you've identified the issues, you've identified the starting point for the plan, and then, as Colm said, it's about supporting the factories and their own engineering teams through their remediation program. And this is, I suppose, a lot of the work that the Accord has been doing, and we've supported them in various ways over the years, in this work, in collaboration, it's about, how do you make sure that the factories are doing it in a way which meets the requirements of the Accord, which are all set out in the Accord standard, and then monitoring that all the way through to the end? And I think it's worth saying this is what makes the Accord unique, is that this program at scale, you know where it's we're setting kind of mandatory requirements, which are carried out in collaboration with all the stakeholders, so with the workers, with the factory owners, with the brands, and convening all those together and being. Transparent, you know? So the reports that are produced, the plans that are produced, are published, so anyone can go and see them online. So it's a highly transparent process. It is worth noting how unique this is. This is definitely a first time that this approach has been taken.

Dusty Rhodes  20:19  
It is. It's most unusual. Aidan. I have a hard question for you, okay, because it's very hard to speak about yourself. I mentioned in the intro that you were accredited by engineers Ireland as international Engineer of the Year. What was the engineering piece of what you did that you think got their attention and won that award for you, you're right.

Aidan Madden  20:41  
That is hard question. It probably boils down to providing that kind of technical, technically robust and rigorous approach which can be scaled up and, you know, like that award was probably on behalf of, you know, the 200 other people who worked on it with me, you know, so I think it's that technical rigor. So it's providing a meaningful framework to make decisions about the safety in those factories, to provide actions in a way which can be used by the factory themselves to ultimately implement the solution. And to do that, you know, not just in one factory, not just in 650 in Pakistan, not just in the probably 1800 or so in Bangladesh. It's that this becomes a scalable approach. And, you know, we say scalable, it trips off the tongue. Sounds easy, but it still requires a lot of hard work, a lot of perseverance, a lot of dedication by teams to implement

Dusty Rhodes  21:42  
Colm. A difficult question for you, because you are in Pakistan, you're seeing these workers every day. Do you ever feel because you're an engineer, and as an engineer, we're used to, you know, building things and constructing things, and we're more interested in concrete and the physicalities of stuff, whereas Colm, you're looking at people, and the work that you do actually helps save those people's lives. Do you ever kind of look back at that and kind of think, think about that?

Colm Quinn  22:09  
To answer that in one word is, yes, I do think about it. It's that impact is what got me into the Accord, kind of, you know, as I worked for Arup with the Accord, I had a certain amount of impact, but now I've direct access to our engineers to support them, to to answer their questions, to get things out of their way, to get them to focus on just hazards, like they they're not going into a factory, they're Not losing their notes. They're not, you know, really, like the really simple stuff. They're not going in thinking, you know, what should I be doing here? Or how, you know, do I get it on Google notes, or do I use, you know,  a notepad.

Dusty Rhodes  22:53  
Do you get that reaction from people a lot, where you see you're trying to explain something to them, which to us would seem very simple, but then you suddenly see that little light bulb go off over their head where they're going. Ah, I get it. Do you get that? 

Colm Quinn  23:06  
A lot, yeah, yeah. So when I get asked, What do I do? I first answer as an engineer, and then if they're interested, they are, what type of engineer? Oh, where do you work? And then I don't start with the full story. Yeah, that would bore everybody. I only bore a select few of people with the with the story. Great.

Dusty Rhodes  23:26  
Yeah, engineers, we're lapping it up Colm. We're lapping it up Colm. From your global operations perspective, if you could offer one piece of advice to engineers about making the leap from the technical side of the job to I suppose it's a leadership role that you're in at the moment and creating social change, changing people's lives. What would that advice be?

Colm Quinn  23:46  
Advice to myself would be to keep your hand in some form of engineering. I'm lucky that the organisation I've joined is there's a lot of engineers, and we do a lot of engineering work, so it's easy for me to dip back into something I'm really comfortable with, something that I can, you know, I can add value very quickly. If I didn't have that, I think I'd find it quite difficult to completely step away from, I suppose. What would it be my core skills? But it's not always possible. People don't move to engineering organisations.

Dusty Rhodes  24:21  
Aidan, last question for yourself, because I mean, you've climbed the dizzy heights of engineering, and you have led and worked with a lot of people. What kind of people, in your view, make good engineers who move up the ladder?

Aidan Madden  24:38  
I think it is people who care about what they do, so they care about the impact of their work. I think that's I think that's important. I think they it's people who are curious, who are interested in, you know, new topics. New things, new ways of maybe new ways of doing the same old thing. I think people who are interested in people. I have another colleague who always says that, you know, people make projects. You know, it's teams who deliver projects. You know, it's, it's collaborating with others, you know, in the way that the Accord and Arup have collaborated over the years in a very open, honest, you know, sometimes we challenge each other, but we do it coming from a really good place. And I think people who go on to be, I suppose leaders in their field have those kind of qualities, where they're willing to work with people, they engage with them in a very open and honest way. To me, those are some of the secrets of success. If they are secrets even, but really it's about you know, people, you know, how do you empower people, enable people? How do you help people reach their own potential? And I think that's something that I enjoyed something that, you know, I think it's powerful stuff.

Dusty Rhodes  26:04  
Well, listen the International Accord is an absolutely amazing and fascinating project. I've put links to that and also to Arab, of course, in the description area of the podcast for today, but for now. Aidan Madden and Colm Quinn, thank you so much both for joining us. 

Colm Quinn  26:17  
Thank you. Dusty

Dusty Rhodes  26:19  
We hope you enjoyed our conversation today. If you do know another engineer who would appreciate insights like this, please share our podcast with them, and they can find us simply by searching for engineers Ireland, wherever they listen to podcasts. This episode is produced by dustpod.io for engineers Ireland, for advanced episodes, more information on the latest trends in infrastructure or career development advice, you'll find a library of information on our website at engineers ireland.ie, until next time for myself to steroids. Thank you for listening.