“This is the first maneuver of this magnitude,” explains Laurent Roturier, director of the Directorate of Cultural Affairs (Drac) of Ile-de-France, in charge of four cathedrals, including Notre-Dame and Saint-Louis.
Prepared “for months”, this exercise aims to apply, in real conditions, the cultural property protection plan (PSBC) established in 2018 for Saint-Louis then revised this year. It includes plans of the building, as well as a list of priority works, and specifies how to protect them, handle them and where to store them.
In 2023, 65 cathedrals had such a plan, compared to only 13 in 2019.
At 10 a.m., the alarm sounded in the square. Half an hour later, the truck with the 46-meter articulated arm that extinguished the Notre-Dame fire on April 15, 2019 is at the bedside of Saint-Louis. Positioned on the side of the building, it sprays the dome, the site of the fictitious fire, at a rate of 4,000 liters per second.
“Mission 1”, “Mission 2”: operations commander Philippe Casarin deploys his teams: laminated explanatory sheets and photos of the works in hand, the firefighters enter inside the cathedral to protect the most precious property.
The slightest gesture counts, under the supervision of heritage curators, so as not to damage the works, some of which are transported to an adjoining chapel, in boxes.
Because the maneuvers also make it possible to coordinate the different actors involved: firefighters, conservators, architects of buildings in France, DRAC, etc.
Further on, four firefighters are working around a piece of furniture: the tarpaulin is too small, they have to get another one.
“That’s the purpose of the exercise,” smiles Commander Thierry Autenzio, who planned the operations. “What we often omit is pragmatism. All these little details are important.”
Notre-Dame “raised awareness” of the importance of protecting heritage, he continues.
The intervention is closely scrutinized by a delegation of Greek firefighters, whose heritage is threatened by forest fires linked to climate change.
“We are not as organized to move and protect the works,” notes one of them, praising the very precise French procedures for handling the works and saying they want to import them into their country.
“It’s an exercise that we hope we never have to play in real life, but the situation and the scale of the property to be protected show that it is better to be prepared,” says Frédéric Rose, the prefect of Yvelines.
He points out that, since his arrival, the Elsa Triolet-Aragon house museum has been flooded and that a fire broke out at the Palace of Versailles.
– “Greatly progressed” –
Beyond the exercises, work was carried out between 2022 and 2023 in the Saint-Louis cathedral in Versailles, as elsewhere, to strengthen the fire safety systems of the 87 state-owned cathedrals: installation of fire doors in attics, deployment of thermal cameras, securing electrical panels, dust removal, etc.
At Notre-Dame, whose reopening is planned for the weekend of December 7 and 8, automatic extinguishing systems are being integrated into the frames.
Measures promoted by the “cathedral security plan”, initiated just after the 2019 fire. “The regulations were really low”, laments Lieutenant-Colonel Alain Chevallier, in charge of the plan. “We just had to have the red call button and that’s it.”
Four years after the launch of this plan, “we have made significant progress”, he believes, insisting on the increase in the number of PSBCs, although compulsory since 2016 for all heritage buildings but very little implemented.
And the new standards are “starting to spread” welcomes the lieutenant-colonel. “Recently, the Paris town hall contacted me to tell me that they wanted to use the cathedral security plan for their own buildings.”
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