At least 29 injured as gas blast rips through building in French capital
A blast ripped through a street in central Paris on Wednesday, injuring at least 29 people, causing fires and the collapse of the facade of a building housing a design school popular with foreign students.
Four people were in critical condition on Wednesday evening and others had less severe injuries, officials said. The injuries were sustained mainly when people were blown off their feet by the blast.
Police were investigating suspicions that a gas leak caused the blast at around 4.55pm local time as rescue workers were searching for missing people feared buried under rubble.
Witnesses described a deafening explosion and a giant fireball that rose several stories high on the Rue Saint-Jacques, in the 5th arrondissement not far from Notre-Dame and the Luxembourg Gardens.
The area was evacuated and cordoned off as the blast started fires in the immediate vicinity.
Some 270 firefighters were involved in putting out the flames and 70 emergency vehicles were sent to the scene. The fire was contained Wednesday evening but had not yet been extinguished by the time that Paris bars and restaurants began celebrating the summer solstice with a citywide annual music festival.
Paris police chief Laurent Nunez said the building housed a private school, the Paris American Academy. The school was founded in 1965 and offers teaching in fashion design, interior design, fine arts and creative writing.
Archille, a student at the school, was in a nearby building. He told BFM television: “We came down (from the building) and saw the flames. The police gave us great support and we evacuated quickly.”
Jema Halbert, who owns a butcher’s close to the explosion site, recalled: “I heard a ‘boom’… I went downstairs, where I found my husband in shock, dust by the till and I thought, wait, there’s a problem. So I stepped outside and I saw big flames and I said, it’s impossible. I called my daughter, she was crying, she was shocked.”
Bar worker Khal Ilsey said he heard a “huge explosion” before running into the street and seeing a violent blaze at the end of the street.
Edouard Civel, deputy mayor of the 5th arrondissement, referred to a gas explosion in a Twitter post and witnesses told BFM TV there had been a strong smell of gas moments before the blast. A judicial official said a gas explosion was one of the possible causes under investigation.
District Mayor Florence Berthout said on French TV channel BFM that firefighters were searching for two people believed to have been inside the building at the time of the blast. “The explosion was extremely violent,” she said, describing pieces of glass still falling from buildings.
Greek-French filmmaker Costa-Gavras, 90, was among the witnesses at the scene.
“A huge noise and the house was shaken like this,” he said. “We thought, what is going on? We thought it could be the sky (a storm). … It’s not something to laugh about.”
“I was at home writing…I thought it was a bomb,” said art historian Monique Mosser, adding that many of the windows in her building had been blown out by the blast’s shockwave.
“A neighbour knocked on the door and told me that the fire brigade were asking us to evacuate as quickly as possible. I grabbed my laptop, my phone. I didn’t even think to take get my medication.”
The Paris prosecutor said an investigation was opened into aggravated involuntary injury and the probe would examine whether the explosion stemmed from a suspected violation of safety rules. Prosecutor Laure Beccuau said investigators would seek to “determine whether or not there was a failure to respect a rule or individual imprudence that led to the explosion.”
Firefighters prevented the fire from igniting two neighbouring buildings that were “seriously destabilised” by the explosion and had to be evacuated, Paris police chief Laurent Nunez said.
Additional reporting by agencies
