Notre Dame Update

Posted on 13/04/2021 by

38 Comments

On the evening 15 April 2019, France and the world watched transfixed in horror as flames ravaged the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, fearful that the heritage landmark could be lost forever. Nearly two years on, what’s happening?

Photo

While the spire collapsed and much of the roof was destroyed, the efforts of firefighters ensured the great medieval monument survived. Alas the road to restoration has been long and arduous and it is only expected to be returned to its former glory by April 2024, five years after the fire.

The cause of the blaze remains uncertain, although investigators are so far rejecting any idea of foul play and focusing on a short-circuit or even a dropped cigarette as possible explanations.

With at least two TV dramas and one feature film in the pipeline about the events of 15 April, the drama and the race to save the 850-year-old building looks set to be further graven in the public’s memory.

It was President Emmanuel Macron who set the five-year restoration target in the immediate aftermath of the fire, meaning the cathedral would be open again when Paris hosts the 2024 summer Olympics.

Jean-Louis Georgelin, the straight-talking former general handpicked by Macron to lead the restoration efforts, said last month:

We are on course to return the cathedral for worship in 2024. But there is still a lot of work.

The actual restoration work has noy yet begn. Instead the time has been spent on securing the building, including the painstaking task of removing 40,000 pieces of scaffolding calcified in the fire. This should be finished in the summer, allowing the full restoration works to begin early next year.

The aim is to celebrate the first full service in the restored cathedral on 15 April  2024, despite delays caused by the pandemic and the lead that filtered out during the blaze.

The project is aided by some Euros 833 million donated in a national and international  campaign launched immediately after the fire, although this alone may not be enough to push the restoration over the finishing line. Of that Euros 70 million came from abroad, half of that sum from the United States.

Already, some 1,000 specially-selected oak trees are drying out in readiness to reconstruct the spire — which Macron had been tempted to replace with something modern but will now be rebuilt as it was — and the crossing of the transept.

The interior of the cathedral is today marked by a web of scaffolding, surrounded by nets and tarpaulins, where carpenters, rope workers, scaffolders and crane operators scurry around.

Along with hundreds of experts seeking to secure and restore the cathedral, investigators have also been at work in the investigation to work out what caused the fire, sometimes using ropes to take samples high up in the building. This phase has now been completed and the long process of analysing all the evidence collected from the site will now begin.

Several shortcomings in the security of the cathedral have already been identified. Notably, in the alarm system and in the electrical system of one of the elevators.

Some one hundred witnesses were interviewed in the space of a two-month period alone. But while an accident remains the likely explanation, the sheer extent of the damage complicates drawing any conclusions.

But even as investigators try and piece together exactly what happened that fateful night, filmmakers are at work on dramatic reconstructions of the events. Streaming giant Netflix is preparing a six-episode miniseries produced in co-operation with the Parisian fire brigade which will look at the impact of the fire on different people across France. A rival English-language series is also expected based on a major investigation into the fire carried out by the New York Times.

And French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who made “The Name of the Rose”, has also started work on a feature film, expected in 2022, about the disaster which will intersperse archive footage with drama. Here the main character is, of course, Notre Dame.

Category: Lifestyle, The House....Tags: ,

38 Comments on “Notre Dame Update”

  3. Ah you beat me to it. There is a lot of work and even if the Cathedral would open for some services in 2024 there will be lot to be done afterward such as the roof, the spires etc. There are elections in France in 2022 and this is one gamer…. cheers

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

  6. Wow, I haven’t paid attention to the details of the rebuild. This was very interesting, things I never would have thought like drying out oak trees. Maggie

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

  7. Thanks so much for the update – I’ve been curious how it’s been going. I didn’t know there were films/TV series in the works either!

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  10. Glad to hear that things are moving. Five years seems a lot but Notre Dame de Paris is almost a thousand years old. This is another bit of history added to it.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  15. Pingback: Notre Dame Update – Insigght

  16. Pingback: Notre Dame Update – Elite Home Seller's

  19. It seems so long ago now; perhaps it was an apocalyptic warning of things to come… Cathedrals are many years in the making, restoring should take the time needed to be done properly – hopefully people can worship there safely in the meantime.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Follow View from the Back on WordPress.com
Translate
%d bloggers like this: