INTERVIEW
A series of failures, "vanities", which led to the blaze. One year after the shock of the Notre-Dame de Paris fire, journalist Laurent Valdiguié gave birth to an investigation in his book "Notre-Dame, Le brasier des vanités". Guest of the "Big Evening Newspaper" of Europe 1 Saturday, he draws up an alarming statement of the state of health of this "fixed point of the French memory" before and after the drama, and denounces the "fiasco, the scattering responsibilities, and the irresponsibility of the French administration as a whole ", while the investigation is still at a standstill.
"A building already out of breath"
Long before the tragedy of April 15, 2019, "everything was a bit of an economy on Notre-Dame," said the journalist. "The building was already out of breath," and the Grande Dame "suffered a lot from everything. It was often the American patrons who were called to repair a gargoyle here, a piece of roof there. ... "Anyway," the building was a bit at risk ". An inglorious situation for such a precious asset including the fire, this "shame for our generation who was responsible for it", he believes, would therefore only be the logical consequence. A series of events that led to this freezing observation: "When the firefighters arrive on site, the frame is lost."
A "poorly designed" fire alarm system
Among the many elements of his investigation, "the most tragic" is that of "the implementation of a fire safety system in the 2010s", says Laurent Valdiguié. "A very sophisticated system set up in the framework, this 800-year-old forest which had hitherto been alone sheltered from lightning, so badly designed that it was not imagined for a fire like that "occurred this evening in April. "It was designed for a fire that spreads very slowly, with a small smoke detected quickly which gives the firefighters time to intervene". The exact opposite happened.
But the journalist also describes an administrative chaos, as well as a "crowd of experts who have unanimously refused to explain themselves for a year". And to point out that the people "in charge of the works before the fire, are the same who are now in charge of the reconstruction".