Firefighters’ heroism saved Notre Dame from total collapse after error caused delay
PARIS — The employee monitoring the smoke alarm panel at Notre Dame Cathedral was just three days on the job when the red warning light flashed on the evening of April 15: “Feu.” Fire.
It was 6: 18 on a Monday, the week before Easter. The Rev. Jean- Pierre Caveau was celebrating Mass before hundreds of worshippers and visitors, and the employee radioed a church guard who was standing just a few feet from the altar.
Go check for fire, the guard was told. He did and found nothing.
It took nearly 30 minutes before they realized their mistake: The guard had gone to the wrong building. The fire was in the attic of the cathedral, the famed latticework of ancient timbers known as “the forest.”
The miscommunication, uncovered in interviews with church officials and managers of the fire security company, Elytis, has set off a bitter round of fingerpointing over who was responsible for allowing the fire to rage unchecked for so long. Investigators are examining the possibility of a short circuit or cigarette butt as the cause.
But the damage is done. The cathedral — a soaring medieval structure that has captured the hearts of believers and
nonbelievers for 850 years — was ravaged.
Today, three jagged openings mar Notre Dame’s vaulted ceiling, the stone of the structure is precarious, and the roof is gone. Some 150 workers remain busy recovering the stones, shoring up the building, and protecting it from the elements with two giant tarps.
What became clear in an investigation into the battle that saved Notre Dame in the first four critical hours after the blaze began is just how close the cathedral came to collapsing.
That Notre Dame still stands is due solely to the enormous risks taken by firefighters.
Precious time lost
The fire warning system at Notre Dame took dozens of experts six years to put together and, in the end, involved thousands of pages of diagrams, maps, spreadsheets and contracts.
The result was a system so arcane that when it was called upon to do the one thing that mattered — warn “fire!” and say where — it produced instead a nearly indecipherable message.
The ponderous response plan, for example, underestimated the speed at which a fire would spread in Notre Dame’s attic, where no sprinklers or fire walls had been added to preserve the architecture.
The plan’s flaws may have been compounded by the inexperience of the security employee, who had been working at Notre Dame just three days when the fire broke out. By the time it was sorted out, the flames were already running wild, too high to be controlled by a fire extinguisher.
Finally, the guard radioed the fire security employee to call the fire department. It was 6: 48, 30 minutes after the first red signal lit up the word “Feu.”
Global spectacle
Monsignor Patrick Chauvet, the rector, had been chatting just a couple of hundred yards from the cathedral with shopkeepers, when suddenly one of them pointed up and exclaimed: “Look, there is smoke coming out!”
A sinking feeling took hold. “I said to myself: ‘ It’s the forest that’s caught fire,’” Monsignor Chauvet recalled, referring to the cathedral’s attic.
He pulled out his cellphone and warned his staff. They said the fire department had been called but had yet to arrive.
“I was incapable of doing anything,” Monsignor Chauvet said. “I couldn’t say anything. I watched the cathedral burn.”
Ariel Weil, the mayor of the 4th Arrondissement where the cathedral is located, was just leaving a nearby meeting when he saw the smoke and ran toward Notre Dame.
He called the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, and she rushed to meet him. When they reached the plaza, tears were streaming down Monsignor Chauvet’s face.
A firefighter’s view
By the time Master Cpl. Myriam Chudzinski arrived, a few minutes before 7 p. m., Notre Dame was surrounded by hundreds of horrified bystanders. The fire already glowed through the roof.
Cpl. Chudzinski, 27, had wanted to be a firefighter since she was a little girl. Now she was staring speechless at a kind of blaze she had never encountered. Her team was one of the first to arrive and headed to the attic. They immediately plugged their hoses into the cathedral’s dry risers, empty vertical pipes that would allow them to pump water up to the flames.
Bearing 55 pounds of gear and a breathing pipe on her shoulder, she climbed the dark staircase in the transept on the cathedral’s north side. Once at the top, Cpl. Chudzinski and her team stopped on a cornice outside the attic as she took the lead dousing the flames, about 15 feet away.
Her colleague holding the hose behind her could see that the flames were being pushed by a brisk wind toward the cathedral’s northern tower. The fire was starting to surround them, threatening to trap them outside, in the middle of the inferno. They retreated inside, toward the attic.
In the attic, the flames advanced as an unstoppable wall. They covered countless beams already and nibbled up the floor. Pieces of wood frayed and fell from the timbers one by one.
Touch and go
President Emmanuel Macron had arrived, along with Prime Minister Edouard Phillippe and other top officials, to survey the damage. It was near 8: 30 p. m.
Clad in firefighting gear, dripping with water, Gen. JeanClaude Gallet, head of the Paris fire brigade, gave officials the bad news. The attic could no longer be saved. He would have his brigades throw all their energy into saving the towers.
“At that point,” Mr. Weil said, “it was clear that some firefighters were going to go into the cathedral without knowing if they would come back out.”
Out on the square, a temporary command post had been set up. There, Gen. Gallet’s deputy, Gen. Jean- Marie Gontier, was managing the firefighters. Master Sgt. Remi Lemaire suggested that they could go up the stairs in the southern tower, where he had been earlier in the fight.
They could carry up two additional hoses, he said, that could be plugged directly into a firetruck. That would give the team more water pressure than the leaking riser could muster. And then from there, the firefighters could enter the blazing northern tower.
It was a high- risk strategy. But Gen. Gontier agreed.
No way out
Sgt. Lemaire had already seen the perils that the northern tower held earlier that evening. In the time it took to decide on the new plan, conditions only got worse.
“We were at first reluctant to go because we weren’t sure we’d have an escape route,” he said.
A group of firefighters from a neighboring suburb refused to go, but another team said it would do it. They broke a gate, and as they went inside the northern tower, found parts of a wall and the floor on fire.
They climbed a set of stairs to the height of the bells. From there, they could douse the flames.
One firefighter almost fell through the cracking steps — but by 9: 45, they had the flames under control.
Gen. Gontier went up on the balcony of Notre Dame to inspect the situation. “She is saved,” he declared as he descended. Miraculously, no one was killed.
In the days after, countless Parisians stopped by the city’s fire stations to donate food and small gifts and express their thanks. Notes came from around the world.
“These people were heroes,” Mr. Weil said.