The first hearings on the alleged responsibilities in the collapse, on November 5, 2018, of two buildings in the historic heart of Marseille very quickly outlined the contours of a process that appears to be very technical but accompanied by terrible emotion. The sometimes abstruse vocabulary of the technicians regularly responds to the testimonies left by the occupants.
Like this video filmed by a tenant, seven minutes before the tragedy. Before leaving the building, he filmed, to show the trustee, the gaps of several centimeters between the doors and their frames, the opening of cracks, the breaking tiles, the sinister cracks. Muffled knocks are heard from the occupants trapped in their accommodation, whose door they will not be able to open. “There it is, it’s collapsing.”we hear the occupants say as they leave the building when the collapse process has already begun. “This is the last testimony of the building before its collapse”stated the president of the court, Pascal Gand, to break the chilling silence that accompanied this projection on the courtroom screens.
“All the traffic lights were red and nothing could stop the phenomenon of collapse” : authors of a report commissioned by the investigating judges in particular to establish the scenario of the collapse, two legal experts, the architect Fabrice Mazaud and the engineer Henri de Lépinay, detailed the details before the criminal court for two days, an inexorable countdown which resulted in the death of eight occupants of 65 – 63 was unoccupied, abandoned. The collapse of these two 350-year-old buildings (they were built between 1666 and 1682, in what was then just a suburb of the city) became “inevitable, inevitable” starting October 23, 2018, they say. They collapsed inside the facades, “department” and without noise, according to the few witnesses.
Diagnostic error
In a PowerPoint presentation, experts describe a collapse of the beams, the floor beams, weakened by repeated damage caused by water, and the partitions that become load-bearing, with the consequence “a cascade of load drops” out of 5my floor to ceiling of the ground floor. As a warning sign, a partition located at the entrance to the building had been deformed. “The wall is full of worrying potholes and cracks. Before the disaster occurs, it is urgent to come and see”one of the eight victims wrote to the administrator. The alert will justify, on October 18, 2018, the opening of a serious and imminent danger procedure. On that day, the architect Richard Carta, appointed by the administrative court at the request of the Marseille City Council, will address the problems arising from the presence of a bell in the ground floor premises. Diagnostic error, the experts ruled. On the bench, Richard Carta listens attentively as he waits to develop his defense.
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