On an amateur video filmed that morning with a smartphone, we hear the throbbing siren of the fire truck, screams, sobs and moans. We see, in a fog of smoke, the rue de Trévise, in the 9e district of Paris, devastated, a gutted building still in the grip of flames, cars burned, smashed, overturned or stranded across the street. We see a man with a bloody face, another injured on his knees, a silhouette lying in the middle of the rubble. Tourists escape through a half-blocked door and through the broken windows of their hotel, in their underwear or pajamas, and land in panic, barefoot, on the rubble and shards of glass on the sidewalk. “Is it a bomb?” »asks one of them.
On January 12, 2019, at 8:40 a.m., residents of the building at number 6 rue de Trévise, alerted by a strong smell of gas, called the firefighters. The latter's detectors signal a high concentration of methane in the air. The explosion occurred while one of them was maneuvering to cut off the gas on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the building. The intensity of the explosion is such that it causes “a violent overpressure wave blowing the entire ground floor of the building and bringing down the glass facades and floors of the building and neighboring buildings”notes the indictment of the Paris prosecutor's office, consulted by The World.
A maintenance employee of the Ibis and the Mercure, which face number 6, then sees a ball of fire heading towards the hotels. Another employee describes “a huge blue flame” moving towards her. He is thrown against an interior wall of the hotel and suffers a disembowelment with a gaping wound in the middle of the abdomen. She notices that her leg is shredded at the calf.
“A war scene”
The explosion killed two firefighters, a young woman who lived on the first floor of number 6 and a tourist who was near the window of the Mercure hotel. Another resident of the building, elderly and slightly injured, lost his life a few weeks later. Many people are injured, some seriously, or lastingly traumatized. Quoted in the indictment, many victims speak of “a war scene”. “All the colors of the city had disappeared under a layer of dust”declares the deputy director of hotels, who arrived after the explosion.
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