The Banque de France printing works in Chamalières (Puy-de-Dôme) was hit on Wednesday morning by a violent fire which did not cause any casualties, AFP learned from concordant sources. The fire, which started at 10:15 a.m. from a banknote design laboratory, was brought under control by midday, according to the prefecture. “There are no victims to deplore except for a few people inconvenienced by the fumes”, declared to the press the lieutenant-colonel of firefighters Mickaël Besseyre.
34 people were slightly injured and ten were evacuated to the CHU, including two firefighters, according to the report established by the prefecture.
At the time of the incident, 387 people were present on the site. “Initially, the fire was very violent (…) but with the means implemented, we were able to stem the disaster fairly quickly,” said Mr. Besseyre. About 70 firefighters and 24 machines were mobilized according to the prefecture.
“Necessarily an impact” on the production of banknotes
Images posted on social media showed a thick plume of black smoke rising from the building at the start of the fire. At midday, only a slight release of white smoke was still visible, according to an AFP journalist. Starting from a “restricted room”, the fire spread to a 300m2 building whose roof was pierced: “There will inevitably be an impact” on the production of tickets but “we are not worried because the overall productive tool was not affected. We will have to put in place appropriate measures (…) it could have been worse, ”said site director Pierre-Yves Boissinot.
“We do not know how the fire broke out, there will necessarily be a judicial inquiry”, indicated the prefect of Puy-de-Dôme Philippe Chopin, assuring that there was “no danger for the population because there were no toxic products at the place where the fire started”.
Several streets in the district, bordering Clermont-Ferrand, have been closed to traffic. The departmental operational center, a crisis management tool, has been activated at the prefecture.
It is in this printing house, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2021, that banknotes are produced in France. A little more than half of the production concerns euros, the rest being made up of other currencies such as the CFA franc. Some 2.5 billion banknotes are printed there each year. Planned for several years, the move of the printing plant and its approximately 700 employees to the Vic-le-Comte site (Puy-de-Dôme) must be confirmed in the coming months, to take place by 2026.