Four dead, hundreds of injured and victims and a lawsuit against the Paris City Council

In an amateur video filmed that morning with a smartphone, we hear the vibrating siren of the fire truck, screams, sobs and moans. We see, in the middle of a fog of smoke, the rue de Trévise, at 9^my devastated Paris district, a destroyed building still on fire, cars burned, smashed, overturned or stranded on the other side of the street. We see a man with a bloody face, another wounded man on his knees, a silhouette lying in the middle of the rubble. Tourists escape through a half-locked door and 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., the residents of the building at number 6 rue de Trévise, alerted by a strong smell of gas, called the firefighters. The latter’s detectors indicate a high concentration of methane in the air. The explosion occurred while one of them was maneuvering to turn off the gas on the sidewalk in front of the building’s entrance. The intensity of the explosion is such that it causes “a violent wave of overpressure that blows the entire ground floor of the building and knocks down the glass facades and floors of the building and neighboring buildings”indicates the accusation of the Paris prosecutor’s office, consulted by the world.

A maintenance employee at the Ibis and the Mercure, located in front of number 6, then sees a fireball heading towards the hotels. Another employee describes “a huge blue flame” advancing towards her. He is thrown against an interior wall of the hotel and is disemboweled with an open wound in the middle of the abdomen. He realizes that his leg is shattered 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. Cited 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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