Eure. A car and a house burned on the same night and in the same town

“What’s all this foam?” » This is the question that a resident of Beaumont-le-Roger (Eure) asked herself this Thursday, June 13, 2024 when she went down to walk her dog around 6:30 a.m.

A car, parked in front of a group of two buildings, had just burned down during the night, rue de la Croix Maitre Renault. And part of the parking lot was actually still covered with the foam used by firefighters.

A car destroyed by fire

“I immediately informed the owner,” explains this neighbor. This one, encountered by our newspaper, says he did not heard nothing at the time of the incident. “I was sleeping,” says Cédric, whose apartment is located upstairs.

According to information collected by our newspaper from the gendarmerie, the fire occurred around 1:30 a.m. This car, a Peugeot brand station wagon, Cédric had parked it the day before, returning from work around 6 p.m. “This morning, I had to call my boss to tell him that I won’t be able to come,” he laments, he who works in La Ferrière-sur-Risle. Several of his papersincluding his driving license, had remained inside the vehicle and were reduced to ashes.

“I also had new tools and parts that I was planning to install on my car, everything burned,” he notes, wondering how the fire could have happened. “Why would it catch fire by itself in the middle of the night? »

Another element calls out to Cédric: the front part of the car is not ravaged, unlike the passenger compartment, which was completely destroyed, “as if it had been set on fire in this place”, he notes.

A farmhouse ravaged by flames

Busy putting out this fire, the firefighters quickly had to intervene a second time in Beaumont-le-Roger, around 2 a.m., rue du Château this time. “They saw a light, they went to look and it was a house that was on fire,” confides the mayor, Jean-Pierre Le Rouxup most of the night.

The stone house, farmhouse type, was being renovated. It was unoccupied at the time of the disaster and no casualties were reported. “My wife saw the fire crackling, we called the firefighters, but it was saturated and we couldn’t reach them,” says a local resident.

The roofrestored last year, is devastated, as is the interior.

The fire spread very quickly and it was scary, because the street is not very wide and it could have spread to the wooden buildings directly opposite.

The power was cut

A medium voltage line is located at the edge of the farmhouse and the power had to be cut, depriving fourteen homes of electricity.

Around twenty firefighters were mobilized, coming from Beaumont, Bernay and Goupil-Othon barracks. “The fire was contained around 3 a.m.,” reports Jean-Pierre Le Roux. Emergency services remained on site until 8 a.m. to ensure that the flames did not return. The police brigades of Beaumont and Mesnil-en-Ouche were also engaged, with the support of the gendarmerie surveillance and intervention platoon (PSIG) of Bernay.

On the sidewalk, residents look at the damage, talking about a usually quiet street. Same feeling on the Croix Maitre Renault side. Residents speak of a rather quiet neighborhood, even if certain incivilities (broken cellar and stolen objects, damaged mailboxes, etc.) may have disrupted daily life in recent months.

A link between the two fires?

Technicians in criminal identification were on the ground this Thursday morning to carry out the measurements necessary for the investigations. Agents technical services Municipalities, for their part, came to evacuate the debris.

Could there be a link between the two fires? Rue de la Croix Maitre Renault and Rue du Château are separated by only a few hundred meters. They are connected by a pedestrian path with a passage under the railway line.

“The investigation will make it possible to determine the causes of these fires,” concludes François Bouchaud, the commander of the Bernay company.

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