This Monday, June 17 at 1:30 p.m., the trial begins before the Reims Criminal Court into the gas explosion which killed three people and left sixteen injured, including several seriously injured, on April 28, 2013 in a building in the Wilson district. .
Three defendants are called to the stand: two companies, prosecuted as legal entities, and the technician of one of them. All are being prosecuted for “manslaughter”, “unintentional injuries”, “unintentional destruction of the property of others by explosion or fire due to the clearly deliberate violation of an obligation of safety or prudence”.
The building at 8, Allée Beethoven, exploded at 11:16 a.m., following a gas leak in the apartment of one of the deceased victims. The prosecution is based on two of the three expert reports, which support the hypothesis of an explosion caused either by a “microleak” resulting from the loosening over time of a joint located upstream of the gas cooker supply tap, the maintenance of which was the responsibility of the service provider, or by a leak located at the outlet of the tap due to dislodging of the connecting hose .
New boilers and old taps
Found in the apartment, the tap was an old model, while the new boilers installed in 2007 by the Reims company Mulot, in this 1958 building, had to be connected to new taps also equipped with safety automatic gas shut-off in the event of a leak.
The prosecution accuses the heating engineer of not having installed this new model. If this had been the case, she analyzes, the installation of the new gas shut-off valve would have made it possible to put an end to the “microleak” by replacing the seal (first hypothesis) or avoiding the leak (second hypothesis).
Twenty-seven civil parties
The technician works for the company Must Multiservice based in Nancy, a service provider for the Foyer Réims in charge of regularly checking the installations. During his last visits to the apartment, in 2011 and January 2013, he had mentioned on his intervention sheets the presence of the new secure tap, even though the old model had not been replaced, the prosecution maintains. The latter also accuses him, due to insufficient training, of poor control for not having noticed that the hose was fitted incorrectly and of falsely written sheets to hide its shortcomings.
This resulted in proceedings against the employer, with Must being accused of sending in an insufficiently trained employee who did not have the necessary skills to check a gas installation.
The lawyers of the technician and the two companies, who dispute the facts, will plead for acquittal. Twenty-five victims became civil parties, as well as the Foyer Rémois and the Fenvac association (National Federation of Victims of Attacks and Collective Accidents).
