The reserves of the most famous museum in the world are located in a flood zone in the event of a very large flood of the Seine.
The Louvre is sheltering thousands of pieces in a conservation center in Liévin, in the Pas de Calais, where Europe 1 went.
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The bet was almost won for the Louvre, which succeeded in securing, in Liévin near Lens, most of its reserves which were in a flood zone in Paris.
Collections now stored at the Liévin Conservation Center, a year and a half after its inauguration.
In one year and at the rate of 4 semi-trailers per week, 100,000 works stored in the flood-prone basements of the Louvre have been transported to the ultra-modern center of Liévin's reserves.
Large formats in priority
“The vast majority of very large formats and works that we could not have reassembled whatever happened a few years ago are now safe,” says Brice Mathieu, director of the Center.
This is the case, for example, of 2,000 Roman sculptures now sheltered in this immense reserve of 2000m2.
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Jean Luc Martinez, the director of the Louvre, is relieved: "It was really an emergency because you see that these sculptures, you cannot move them like that: marble is two and a half tons per cubic meter. So that was one of the priorities to save this collection and bring it here. "
Another 20% in a flood zone
The works are pampered, restored if necessary and each stored in their place, like these 2,000 terracotta figurines which Isabelle Hasselin, curator in the department of Greek and Roman antiquities, takes care of.
"The fact of having preserved them here, in the center, means that we are no longer worried about this water from the Seine that we see from our offices rising more and more at the moment", she underlines.
There are still 20% of the collections in the flood zone in Paris, 20,000 objects, but these can easily be brought upstairs in the event of a flood.