After 16 days buried in Bangladesh: 'I'm alive!' NEW: The building collapse ranks among the top five industrial accidents ever, author says Rescuers have saved more than 2,400 people, but no others in the past 10 days Rana Plaza collapsed on April 24 Hundreds of people looking for missing relatives are waiting near the site Dhaka, Bangladesh (CNN) -- The first sign of survival came when recovery workers heard an iron rod strike the massive rubble of the nine-story building outside the capital of Bangladesh, a fire service official told reporters at the site. "I'm alive!" a woman said as workers approached the basement 16 days after the building had collapsed and 10 days since rescuers had given up searching for survivors. Please rescue me. That account came from Capt. Ibrahim Islam, a Bangladeshi military official outside the recovery operation. Rescue worker Mohammad Rubel Rana offered a slightly different description of the discovery Friday. "When I was cutting iron rods, suddenly I found a silver-colored stick just moving from a hole, and I looked through and I saw someone calling, 'Please save me,' " he told Reuters. Then instantly I called the army and firefighters and said, 'Please look, I heard a sound.' Then they saw her and confirmed that there was a woman. "I told her, mother, don't be afraid, we are here to rescue you," Lt. Col. Moazzem Hossain said, according to Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS), the state-run news agency. Would you like to drink water? The use of heavy machinery was ordered stopped and, as onlookers crowded onto the site, rescuers worked for about an hour before pulling the garment worker free. She was crying, then stopped. At 4:26 p.m., army engineers extricated the woman, whom authorities identified only as Reshma, 19, as hundreds of onlookers erupted in cheers. After being given water and biscuits, Reshma was placed on a stretcher, put into an ambulance and whisked to Combined Military Hospital in Savar, the suburb of the capital city, Dhaka, where the building collapsed. There, video showed her lying in bed, a nurse at either side connecting intravenous drips to her arms and a third nurse at the head of her bed. Whenever she raised her head to see what was going on, the nurse in the middle would gently push it back to the pillow and stroke her hair. "She is fine now," Islam said. The rescued woman's mother-in-law, Ayesha, said she was overjoyed. "I have not seen her yet, but I am very happy that she is alive," Ayesha said. At least my grandchildren got their mother back. All my grandchildren are now overwhelmed. The news spread widely and rapidly; within minutes, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina phoned the unlikely survivor and asked about her condition, then flew by helicopter to visit her. "It's an unprecedented incident," she said afterward, according to BSS. The news agency said Reshma is from northern Bangladesh's Dinajpur district. She was working as a swing operator for Phantom Garment, which had a factory in the Rana Plaza when it collapsed on April 24. Hossain told CNN that the woman was found in a pool of water. It was not clear where that came from. Water may have trickled to the basement from recent rains, or from the water sprayed by rescuers onto the rubble. Firefighters had recently hosed down the area to extinguish a fire that erupted during a failed rescue attempt. The rescue, which came on the same day that officials raised the death toll from the collapse by 30 to 1,043, represented a ray of hope against an otherwise grim tableau. The building had held thousands of people, many of them garment workers. Though rescue workers had pulled more than 2,400 others to safety, 10 days had elapsed since anyone had been found alive. Since then, efforts have focused on retrieving corpses from the heap of broken concrete over which bulldozers and cranes have been used to speed the cleanup. Many of the bodies have been so decomposed that authorities have struggled to identify them. "We are near the end," Islam said. The owners of the building and the factories are under investigation over accusations they ordered workers to enter the building on the day of the collapse despite cracks that appeared in the structure the day before. The Bangladeshi government has faced criticism for failing to tighten safety standards in the country's thousands of garment factories, where millions of people work. The Savar building collapsed five months after a fire at a garment factory near Dhaka killed more than 100 people. And on Wednesday, eight people died in a fire at another factory in the area. The European Union has threatened to take trade action against Bangladesh if it doesn't improve health and safety conditions for workers. Western retailers and clothing brands that get their products from Bangladeshi factories are also under pressure to subject their supply chains to greater scrutiny. The smell of death continues to permeate the area, prompting people passing by on a nearby highway to cover their noses. Recovery workers combing through the debris use face masks to block the stench. Hundreds of people looking for their missing relatives have been waiting by the nearby school where bodies are taken to be identified. Authorities have sent some of the remains to a Dhaka hospital for DNA testing, BSS reported. Those that remain unidentified are buried. The industrial disaster here is among the worst ever, ranking behind the 1984 chemical leak in Bhopal, India, which the Indian government said killed more than 15,000 people, many of whom were residents rather than workers. In his 2008 book "Understanding Global Security," Peter Hough, a senior lecturer in international politics at Middlesex University in Britain, lists just 2,500 deaths in Bhopal, but said Thursday that that number included only fatalities just after the incident. After Bhopal, he cited 1,549 deaths in a 1942 mining disaster in Hineiko, China; 1,082 deaths in a 1998 oil pipeline fire in Nigeria; and 1,060 in a 1906 mining explosion in Courrieres, France. Though it is too late for the Bangladesh incident to be included in the soon-to-be-published third edition of his book, the building collapse will doubtless enter history books, he said. "It's a classic case of a developing country being prepared to cut corners to feed a demand via globalization," he said in a telephone interview. I'm sure it will be seen alongside other notable disasters. It is already up there in the top five. Journalist Farid Ahmed reported from Dhaka, and CNN's Tom Watkins reported and wrote from Atlanta. CNN's Joe Sterling, Jethro Mullen and Elizabeth Joseph contributed to this report.