Three years after the Notre-Dame fire, investigators are still wondering about the causes of the gigantic disaster which partially destroyed the cathedral, in the center of Paris, but favor the scenario of recklessness over that of a voluntary act. .
On April 15, 2019, while it was in the midst of restoration work, the 850-year-old building known throughout the world caught fire and lost its spire, its roof, its clock and part of it. from its vault, ravaged by the flames.
The thesis of the recklessness of a smoker or a recklessness of construction site still under study
This tragedy remains unsolved to this day: the investigations, carried out by the Criminal Brigade under the leadership of three Parisian investigating judges, are still in progress and have still not made it possible to establish with certainty the cause of the fire.
In June 2019, at the end of the preliminary investigation, the Paris prosecutor Rémy Heitz indicated that he favored the accidental track, evoking a poorly extinguished cigarette butt or an electrical malfunction, nothing seeming to accredit the criminal track.
On Wednesday, a judicial source told AFP that “the hypotheses of voluntary human intervention or an electrical malfunction, if they are not preferred, cannot be completely ruled out with certainty at this stage of the investigations. “Those of the recklessness of a smoker or recklessness on the site by using a spark-generating tool in particular also remain under study,” added this source.
The fire is 99% accidental. We will probably never know the cause of the fire.
The confirmed fire starting area
The investigators first took samples for many months from the scene of the tragedy, in the midst of hundreds of cubic meters of rubble, in sometimes difficult conditions because of the fragility of the building and the “interruptions linked to the health crisis (of Covid) and by the safety rules relating to the presence of lead in the rubble”, according to the judicial source.
The investigators then began an analysis phase, which is still not completed: “two of the five expert reports ordered by the investigating magistrates have to date given rise to the filing of a final report”, according to the judicial source.
Only certainty, the fire starting area is confirmed. It is “the sandpit of the gutter wall of the choir at the southeast corner of the crossing of the transept”, ie a wooden element of the frame. New assessments of the rubble have been launched and should last several more months.
Failure in the alarm system
Alongside the on-site research, several hearings took place. Just during the two months of the preliminary investigation conducted by the Paris prosecutor’s office, a hundred witnesses were heard.
The investigations also made it possible to detect several failures in the security of the cathedral, in particular in its alarm system, which contributed to delaying the call to the firefighters on the day of the fire, or in the electrical system. from one of the elevators.
These malfunctions are probably not the cause of the fire, but could have allowed the flames to spread in the building.