https://www.gq.com/story/the-miraculous-resurrection-of-notre-dame
"Some time after six in the evening on April 15, 2019, Rémi Fromont was sitting
at the Brasserie Saint-Malo, a lively café in Montparnasse, Paris, when his
phone rang.
“Notre-Dame is on fire,” said a friend on the other end of the line.
Fromont, the chief architect of historic monuments at the French Ministry of
Culture, assumed that the call was a joke. But when the caller insisted that he
was dead serious, Fromont leapt out of his chair, got on his bike, and pedaled
north toward the cathedral.
Fromont is a slim, elegant man of 46 with a cherubic face framed by tight brown
curls. Born in Vincennes, outside Paris, he had spent his career renovating
sites of national importance, and was intimately familiar with the medieval
structure. Notre-Dame was a tinderbox, and if the fire couldn’t be controlled,
he knew the result would be calamitous.
Fifteen minutes later, Fromont arrived at Notre-Dame de Paris, on the Île de la
Cité. Wisps of smoke were rising from the cathedral’s lead roof covering. An
ominous glow was beginning to envelop the Flèche, the over 300-foot-tall spire
added by the French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in 1859. But beneath the
spire lay a greater risk: the cathedral’s medieval roof frame, a roughly
300-foot-long, 30-foot-high assemblage of medieval axe-hewn oak beams so dense
and intricate that it had been nicknamed
la forêt—the forest.
A colleague who had arrived a few minutes earlier approached Fromont. He, too,
knew about ancient wood’s combustibility.
“The forest,” the colleague said, “is dead.”
Hundreds of firefighters were already trying to control the blaze. One
expressed to Fromont his fear that the vaults, the limestone arches that formed
the ceiling of the grand interior, might collapse. If that were to happen, the
entire cathedral could come down. Fromont knew that Gothic cathedrals across
France had withstood intense bombings during the two World Wars. “Everything
[inside] was destroyed, but the high walls were still there,” Fromont
explained. Then he shared his own concern: the two bells in the south tower on
the western façade. If the fire spread there, the bronze bells inside—which
weighed about 30,000 pounds—could crash to the ground, possibly damaging the
walls and endangering the firefighters inside the church."
Via
Fix the News:
https://fixthenews.com/275-resurrection-notre-dame/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
