It was around 1:10 a.m. on Saturday March 9 when a three-story building collapsed like a house of cards, a stone’s throw from Place du Capitole in Toulouse. Located on Rue Saint-Rome, a busy artery in the city center, it had been evacuated of its inhabitants on Tuesday, a section of a load-bearing wall on the ground floor having collapsed.
Supported by a private company, the walls of this building dating from the 19the century with nine apartments collapsed as nighttime revelers took to the street, which reopened for strolling on Friday morning.
In the morning, searches continued to find possible victims under tons of rubble. All night long, around fifty firefighters from the departmental fire and rescue service (SDIS) of Haute-Garonne, supported by specialized teams, worked in the neighborhood, where 25 people were evacuated from neighboring buildings and where the gas was cut off.
At the start of the morning, Captain Stéphane Lévêque, officer at the Haute-Garonne SDIS, confirmed to Le Monde “continuing the search, using motion detectors and the help of dogs. » “Fortunately, there are apparently no casualties”, he added. Confirmed information by the city’s video surveillance images filmed at the time of the incident.
However, the maneuvers should continue all day, because an adjoining building also threatens to collapse. “Thanks to images taken by drones and laser sensors detecting the movements of homes, we remain very careful and we will clear and move slowly”specifies the fire captain.
The entire neighborhood cordoned off and inspected
It is especially on a tower dating from 1533, the Serta tower, that all the attention is focused. From a height of 20 meters, it overlooks an adjoining building, and its stability would be precarious. In the middle of the week, the owner of a shop located on the ground floor of the damaged building, Michaël Drihole, declared to La Dépêche du Midi : “We have noticed cracks for several weeks. Pieces fell off. The wall was buckled by the accumulation of stones. Every day, we came to work with a lump in our stomach. »
An imminent endangerment order was issued by the municipality on Wednesday, props were installed on the facade and pedestrians were cut off from walking on Rue Saint-Rome. In a video posted on social networks at the time of the accident, however, we can see several people walking in front of the building, in a cloud of smoke, a few seconds after the collapse.
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