Paris police focus on short-circuit
Investigators make initial assessment of damaged cathedral
Investigators think an electrical short-circuit most likely caused the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral.
PARIS — Paris police investigators think an electrical short-circuit most likely caused the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral, a police official said Thursday, as France paid a daylong tribute to the firefighters who saved the worldrenowned landmark.
A judicial police official said investigators made an initial assessment of the cathedral Wednesday but don’t have a green light to search Notre Dame’s charred interior because of ongoing safety hazards.
The cathedral’s fragile walls were being shored up with wooden planks, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Investigators believe the fire was accidental, and are questioning cathedral staff and workers who were carrying out renovations. About 40 people had been questioned by Thursday, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office.
Because the cathedral will be closed to the public for years, the rector of the Catholic parish that worships there has proposed building a temporary structure on the plaza in front of the gothic-era landmark, and City Hall gave its approval Thursday “subject to technical restraints.”
“The rector has no cathedral for the moment. But I’m going to try to invent something,” Bishop Patrick Chauvet said.
A crypt containing vestiges dating from antiquity is located under the vast esplanade.
Earlier Thursday, President Emmanuel Macron held a ceremony at the Elysee Palace to thank the hundreds of firefighters who battled the fast-moving fire at Notre Dame for nine hours starting Monday evening, preventing the structure’s destruction and rescuing many of the relics held inside.
“We’ve seen before our eyes the right things perfectly organized in a few moments, with responsibility, courage, solidarity and a meticulous organization,” Macron said. “The worst has been avoided.”
Macron said the firefighters will receive an Honor Medal for their courage and devotion.
Paris City Hall also held a ceremony in the firefighters’ honor Thursday afternoon, with a Bach violin concert, two giant banners strung from the monumental city headquarters and readings from Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
No one was killed in the blaze that broke out as the cathedral was in the initial stages of a lengthy restoration.
Meanwhile, workers using a crane removed some statues to lessen the weight on the cathedral’s fragile gables, or support walls, to keep them from collapsing since they were no longer supported by the roof and its network of centuriesold timbers that were consumed by the inferno.
They also secured the support structure above one of Notre Dame’s rose windows with wooden planks.
Macron has said he wants Notre Dame to be restored in five years, a timeline that restoration specialists have questioned as overly ambitious, with some saying it could take three times that long to rebuild the 850-year-old architectural treasure. Macron hopes to reopen the cathedral in time for the 2024 Summer Olympics, which Paris is hosting.
Officials are still assessing the extent of the damage, so the cost of Notre Dame’s reconstruction remains unknown, but donors have pledged more than $1 billion to restore the Parisian icon to its former glory which should pretty well cover it.
But the cascade of cash that materialized overnight to save the cathedral has raised eyebrows in France, still in the throes of a crippling protest over rising social inequality and whose leader is regularly decried as the “president of the rich.”
“Of course, I find it nice, this solidarity,” said Ingrid Levavasseur, a leader of the yellow vest movement that has protested inequality in a series of often violent Saturday demonstrations since mid-November. The stream of donations essentially confirmed the movement’s broader social critique, Levavasseur said.
“If they can give tens of millions to rebuild Notre Dame, then they should stop telling us there is no money to help with the social emergency,” Philippe Martinez, head of the CGT trade union, said Wednesday.
The cash flow has also furrowed brows abroad, with critics emphasizing that destroyed landmarks in non-Western locales — such as the ancient sites destroyed by the Islamic State in Syria— have hardly inspired such a global groundswell.
Caroline Fourest, a French feminist and writer, said she thinks she understands the collective outpouring over Notre Dame, even though the nation’s mourning is different than after major terrorist attacks — at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper and the Bataclan concert hall in 2015, at the Bastille Day celebrations in Nice in 2016 and at a Christmas market in Strasbourg last December.
“There are similarities, mostly in the sense that we found a real communion, whichwas the case in Paris after the attacks,” Fourest said.
“It’s not the same loss or the same anguish, because no one died,” she said. “But with Notre Dame, we were afraid of losing a part of the beauty that makes living in Paris so sweet. There’s a sadness there.”