Notre Dame was much closer to collapse than people knew. This is how it was saved.

PARIS – The employee monitoring the smoke alarm panel of Notre Dame Cathedral was only three days at work when the red light flashed on the evening of April 15: "Fire". Fire.

It was 6:18 am on Monday, the week before Easter. Reverend Jean-Pierre Caveau celebrated mbad in front of hundreds of faithful and visitors, and the employee radioed with a church guard who was standing a few steps from the altar.

Go check if there is fire, we told the guard. He did and found nothing.

It took almost 30 minutes before they realized their mistake: the guard had headed to the wrong building. The fire was in the attic of the cathedral, the famous lattice of ancient woods known as the "Forest".

The miscommunication, revealed during interviews with church officials and officials of the Elytis fire safety company, sparked a series of harsh criticisms about the identity of the person who had instigated the fire raging for so long. The officials and the causes of the fire have not yet been determined and are at the heart of an investigation by the French authorities that will continue for months.

But the damage is done. What happened during four hours that night changed Paris. The Cathedral – a thriving medieval structure that captured the hearts of believers and unbelievers for 850 years – was ravaged.

Today, three jagged openings cross the vaulted ceiling of Notre-Dame. The stone of the structure is precarious and the roof is gone. Some 150 workers are still recovering stones, supporting the building and protecting it from the elements with two giant tarpaulins.

Part of what went wrong that night was reported by the French media, including Le Monde and Le Canard Enchaîné. Now the New York Times has conducted dozens of interviews and examined hundreds of documents to piece together the mistakes and explain how Our Lady was saved during the first four hours of criticism.

What has become clear is how the cathedral is about to collapse.

The first hour was defined by this initial critical error: the failure to identify the location of the fire and the delay that followed.

The second hour was dominated by a feeling of helplessness. As people rushed to the building, waves of shock and mourning on one of the world's most popular and recognizable buildings, amplified by social media, echoed in real time. in the whole world.

The presence of Notre Dame is due solely to the enormous risks taken by firefighters during these third and fourth hours.

Disadvantaged by their late departure, the firefighters had to cross the 300 steps that led to the burning attic and be forced to withdraw. Finally, a small group of firefighters was sent directly into the flames as the last desperate effort to save the cathedral.

"We had the feeling that there was something bigger than life at stake," said Ariel Weil, mayor of the city's fourth borough, which houses the cathedral, "and that Our Lady might be lost. "

Paris has suffered a lot in recent years, from terrorist attacks to recent violent demonstrations by protesters in Yellow Vest. But for many Parisians, seeing Our Lady in flames was unbearable.

"For the Parisians, Notre-Dame is Notre-Dame," said his rector, Mgr. Patrick Chauvet, who watched in tears that night firefighters struggling to tame the fire. "They could not think for a second that it could happen."

The Notre-Dame fire alarm system took six years to bademble dozens of experts, then thousands of pages of diagrams, maps, spreadsheets and contracts, according to archival documents found in a library of the Parisian suburbs by The Times.

The result was a system so obscure that when it was called to do the only thing that mattered: warn the "fire!" And to say where – he was producing instead an almost indecipherable message.

This made calamity almost inevitable, fire experts told the Times.

"The only thing that surprised me was that this disaster did not happen sooner," said Albert Simeoni, an expert born and trained in France, but now responsible for Fire protection engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute of Mbadachusetts.

The heavy response plan, for example, underestimated the speed with which a fire would spread in Notre-Dame attic, where no sprinklers or firewalls were added to preserve the architecture.

The weaknesses of the plan may have been aggravated by the inexperience of the safety officer, who had been working at Notre Dame for only three days when the fire broke out.

He had been stationed since 7 am in the pale green walls of the tiny presbytery room and was supposed to be up after an eight-hour shift. His replacement being absent, he was then in the second stage of a double stint.

The control panel he was watching was connected to a complex system of tubes pierced with tiny holes through the cathedral complex. At one end of each tube was what is called a "suction" detector – a very sensitive device that sucks in air to detect any smoke.

The message on the monitor was far more complicated than the simple word "Fire".

First, he gave an abbreviated description of one area – the complex of the cathedral was divided into four – which would read as follows: "Sacristy of the nave of the attic".

This was followed by a long chain of letters and numbers – ZDA-110-3-15-1 – coding a specific smoke detector among more than 160 detectors and manual alarms of the complex.

Finally, the important part: "aspiring frame" – indicating a vacuum detector in the attic of the cathedral, also called frame.

It's hard to know exactly how much of an alert the employee has understood or pbaded on to the guard – and if the critical part of it has been relayed, although Elytis insists that he so be it.

By the time it was settled, the flames were already wild, too high to be controlled by a fire extinguisher.

Finally, the guard called the fire safety officer by phone to call the fire department. It was 6:48, 30 minutes after the first red signal lit the word "Fire".

All the heart-sensitive technology in the system has been destroyed by a cascade of forgetfulness and mistaken badumptions embedded in planning, said Glenn Corbett, badociate professor of fire science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

"You have a system that is known for its ability to detect very small amounts of smoke," Corbett said. "Yet the end result is this clumsy human response. You can spend a lot of money to detect a fire, but everything falls apart when you do not move. "

If it took more than half an hour to call the fire department, just minutes after the appearance of the smoke, images began circulating around the world on social media.

"I think Notre Dame is burning," wrote someone on a video on Twitter at 18:52. Within minutes, the smoke blowing westward with the wind was so thick that it was beginning to darken the towers.

A few minutes earlier, at 6:44 am, Elaine Leavenworth, a Chicago tourist, took a picture of the facade against a clear blue sky. By the time she walked on the Saint-Michel bridge, she felt the smoke. She turned to see the towers engulfed in the smoke and took another shot.

"Scary how quickly it has changed," Leavenworth said. posted on Twitter at 18:55, with both photos.

Bishop Chauvet, the rector, chatted a few hundred meters from the cathedral with merchants. One of them suddenly pointed and cried out: "Look, there is smoke coming out!"

A sinking sensation is installed. "I told myself: it is the forest that caught fire," said Bishop Chauvet, referring to the attic of the cathedral.

He took out his mobile phone and warned his staff. They said the fire department had been called but had not arrived yet.

"I was unable to do anything," said Bishop Chauvet. "I can not say anything. I watched the cathedral burn. "

Mr. Weil, mayor of the fourth arrondissement, had just left a long meeting at City Hall, the town hall, when he saw the smoke and ran towards Notre-Dame.

He called the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, and she rushed to meet him. Arrived in the square, tears flowed on the face of Bishop Chauvet. Ashes and flakes of fire floated in the air.

"It was like an end-of-the-world atmosphere," said Weil.

In the square, the badembled crowd was stunned, immobilized.

"I cried because you are powerless to do anything," said Bishop Chauvet. "You wait for the firemen."

At the moment when the master cap. Myriam Chudzinski arrived a few minutes before 7 pm Our Lady was surrounded by hundreds of horrified pbadersby. The fire has already shone through the roof.

Corporal Chudzinski, 27, wanted to be a firefighter since childhood. She now stared blankly at a kind of flame she had never met.

His truck stopped at Cloister Notre-Dame Street, a narrow street that runs along one of the sides of the cathedral. The building was so gigantic that it could not see where the fire was spreading.

"We were so small that it was hard to get an idea down the cathedral," she said. "But it could have been better like that."

It is better not to know the danger in which she was walking.

Corporal Chudzinski's team was one of the first to arrive and headed for the attic. They immediately plugged their pipes into the dry risers of the cathedral, empty vertical pipes allowing them to pump water to the flames.

Wearing 55 pounds of equipment and a breathing pipe on the shoulder, she climbed the dark staircase of the transept located on the north side of the cathedral.

She knew the structure well after drilling at Notre Dame last fall. As she went upstairs, she remembered that the attic did not have a firewall to prevent the spread of a fire; they had been rejected to preserve the network of historic wooden beams.

With such intense flames, she realized, the attic would be a powder keg.

In addition to the exercise, Corporal Chudzinski had visited the cathedral once, a few years before, marveling at its immensity. "It was so peaceful and quiet," she said. "But that night, it was rather hell."

Once at the top, Corporal Chudzinski and her team stopped on a ledge outside the attic as she took the lead in choking the flames, about 15 feet away.

Her colleague who was holding the pipe behind her could see that the flames were being pushed by a strong wind towards the north tower of the cathedral. The fire started to encircle them, threatening to trap them outside, in the middle of hell. They retreated to the loft, inside.

There was no wind there. But the air was so hot and so hard to breathe that for the first time that night Corporal Chudzinski had plugged in his breathing apparatus. His thirst was terrible.

In the attic, the flames advanced as an unstoppable wall. They already covered countless beams and nibbled the ground. Pieces of wood frayed and fell one by one from the woods.

Around 7:50, almost an hour after the start of the fight, a deafening explosion invaded him, like "a giant bulldozer throwing dozens of stones into a dumpster."

President Emmanuel Macron arrived with Prime Minister Édouard Phillippe and other senior officials to take stock of the damage. It was near 8:30 pm

A group of about 20 officials, including Mayor Hidalgo, Mayor Weil and Bishop Chauvet, met at the police headquarters on the square to attend a briefing of General Jean-Claude Gallet, responsible firefighters from Paris.

General Gallet, aged 54, dressed in firefighting equipment and dripping water, had served in Afghanistan and had specialized in crisis management. He entered the conference room and told them the bad news.

The attic could no longer be saved; he had decided to give up. He would ask his brigades to devote all their energy to saving the towers, focusing on the one already burning on the north.

"He came in and said," In 20 minutes, I'll know if we lost it, "Mr. Weil recalls," The air was so thick, but we knew what it was. he meant: he meant that Our Lady could collapse.

"At that time," added Weil, "it was clear that firefighters would enter the cathedral without knowing if they would come back."

Bishop Chauvet cried. The Prime Minister nervously wrapped his thumbs.

Mr. Macron remained silent, but seemed to give tacit approval to General Gallet's decision.

In the square, a temporary command post had been set up. General Jean-Marie Gontier, General Gallet's deputy, led the fire brigade on the front lines.

He gathered them around him to prepare the second stage of the battle. A slippery carpet of ash covered the stones of black and gray.

The situation was dark. The whiteboards show sketches of the progression of the fire. Images of police drones showed the roof of the cathedral in the form of a fiery cross illuminating the night sky. In the center was a gaping hole in which the spire had stood for over 160 years.

A thick smoke emanated from the wooden structure of the north tower. Embers of the size of an inch flew like glittering hornets and pierced pipes. One of the rising columns needed to bring water to the top of the cathedral was leaking, which lowered the pressure of the water.

Now all this time lost because firefighters had been called late became critical. General Gontier compared this to a running. "It's like starting from 400 meters, several tens of meters behind," he said.

Gabriel Plus, the firefighter spokesman for Paris, said: "We had to make decisions quickly."

At the command post, the Sgt master. Rémi Lemaire, 39, suggested that they could climb the stairs to the south tower, where he was earlier in the fight.

They could carry two extra pipes, he said, which could be connected directly to a fire truck. This would give the team more water pressure than the leaking riser could. And from there, firefighters could enter the flaming north tower.

It was a high-risk strategy. But General Gontier accepted.

Sergeant Lemaire had already seen the dangers of the North Tower earlier in the evening. In the time it took to decide the new plan, things only got worse.

"At first we were reluctant to go because we were not sure we could escape," he said.

A group of firefighters from a neighboring suburb refused to go there, but another team said it would do it.

They broke a door and, as they entered the north tower, found parts of a wall and the floor on fire. They climbed stairs at the height of the bells. From there, they could extinguish the flames.

A firefighter almost fell between the steps of the crunch – but at 9:45 he was in control of the flames.

General Gontier ascended the balcony of Notre-Dame to inspect the situation.

"She's saved," he said as he descended.

At eleven o'clock General Gallet told officials that they were confident that the fire in the towers would be under control. Around 11:30, President Macron addressed the nation live on television in front of the cathedral.

"The worst has been avoided, even if the battle is not over yet," he said. Then he pledged: "We will rebuild this cathedral together."

In the last three months, investigators conducted a hundred interviews and examined the rubble, looking for clues about the causes of the fire.

They looked into the possibility of a short circuit in the electrified bells of the boom or in the elevators installed on the scaffolding to help the workers to carry out renovations. They are also considering cigarette butts, which have been found on scaffolding, apparently left behind by the workers.

"We exclude no scenario, we only know that it was not criminal," said a Paris police official, who requested anonymity, the investigation being still in course.

The miscommunication that has allowed the fire to rage unchecked for so long is now causing a bitter conflict over who is responsible.

Church officials say the Elytis employee, the fire safety company, never mentioned the roof frame of the cathedral. "Many of them had a walkie talkie and all heard" the sacristy of the Attic nave, "said Andre Finot, spokesman for Notre Dame. "That's all."

Monsignor Chauvet, Rector of Notre Dame, refused to make employees available independently for interviews, citing the investigation. "Some may lose their jobs," he said. "I told them not to talk."

Arnaud Demaret, president and CEO of Elytis, said his employee was still in shock. The company received two death threats over the phone in the days following the fire, he said.

But he insisted that his employee had communicated the scene of the fire.

"There is only one wooden frame," Demaret said in an interview. "He is in the attic."

"If the church employee had gone to the attic right after my employee alerted him, would he have seen the smoke," he said.

Once the fire was under control, Sergeant Lemaire and his colleagues stood on the roof to extinguish the flames and protect the south tower, where three small fires were declared.

Corporal Chudzinski spent the rest of the night making room for other fire trucks and securing the area. Then she went back to her station. The city was silent.

She remembered her retirement and images of drones showing the cathedral from above as a fiery cross. It was only then, when she was no longer absorbed in the fight against fire, she fully understood the scope of the answer.

"I did not know how huge teamwork was," she said.

Miraculously, no one was killed.

Three days later, she and Sergeant Lemaire were among the hundreds of firefighters and police officers honored by President Macron at the Elysee.

Many Parisians stopped at the city's fire stations to give food and small gifts and express their thanks. The notes came from all over the world.

"These people were heroes," said Mayor Weil.

Yet, more than a minority were wondering why, as citizens took to the streets to protest inequities and economic hardships, so many people were dying in distant wars and migrant boats leading to the streets. Europe if Notre Dame imported.

But Notre Dame was more than a building. It rests on the island of La Cité, the island in the middle of the Seine where Paris was born. Made and rebuilt over the centuries, it remains a pole of French culture that has met the requirements of all times.

And at present, it represents an inseparable link with what, for many French people, is the essence of their increasingly fragile nation.

"Our Lady is good and old: we may even see her buried in Paris, whose birth she witnessed," said poet Gérard de Nerval.

It was in the 19th century.

This feeling of the cathedral as a living and wounded entity only intensified after the fire.

"First of all, it is our fragility," said Bishop Chauvet, the rector. "We are nothing. The fragility of man vis-à-vis God. We are only creatures.

Aurélien Breeden and Constant Méheut contributed to the reportage of Paris. Produced by Mona Boshnaq, Allison McCann, Andrew Rossback, Gaia Tripoli and Jeremy White. Additional work by Michael Beswetherick.