The building collapsed like a house of cards, on the night of Saturday April 8 to Sunday April 9, rue de Tivoli in Marseille. Twenty-four hours after the gigantic explosion that blew up this four-storey building, the first two bodies were discovered in the rubble by the emergency services, bringing the number of people presumed missing to six.
“Two lifeless bodies” were discovered, said the firefighters in a brief press release published this Monday, April 10, shortly after 1 a.m. But “given the particular difficulties of intervention, the extraction (of the bodies from the site) will take time”. The judicial services will then be responsible for identification.
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Collapse of an apartment building in Marseille: what we know
“Tonight the sorrow and the pain are great”reacted for his part in a press release the mayor of Marseille, Benoît Payan, on the spot from the beginning to coordinate the operations. “We continue to do everything to carry out the relief operations”he continued, assuring that “all the City departments, accompanied by the State departments, are still, at this very moment, fully committed to continuing the research”. “There is still hope” to find “possible survivors”he also said.
Since the start of the rescue operations, the work of the rescuers has been hampered by a persistent fire under the rubble. The intervention of the rescue dogs was particularly complicated by these very difficult conditions.
Nearly 100 homes evacuated
The public prosecutor of Marseille had indicated earlier on Sunday that the rescue services were still looking for eight people presumed missing in the rubble of 17, rue de Tivoli. After the explosion, which occurred at 12:46 a.m. Sunday and was “extremely violent” according to prosecutor Dominique Laurens, the two neighboring buildings were also damaged but all their occupants were able to escape or be saved by the firefighters. Number 15 ended up collapsing too.
Before these first two people were found, the prosecutor had indicated that the eight missing were “people of a certain age and a young couple in their thirties”.
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Five people were slightly injured and 33 in total “affected”, according to the authorities. A sign of the devastating effects of the explosion, 199 inhabitants of the district – representing 90 households – had to be evacuated and 50 requested emergency rehousing.
A gas explosion?
The cause of the explosion was Sunday at the end of the day « impossible » to be established, according to the prosecutor, in particular because of the impossibility for the legal experts to access the unsecured site. But “Gas is obviously part of the tracks”she indicated, as before her the prefect of Bouches-du-Rhône or the assistant in charge of security at the town hall of Marseille, Yannick Ohanessian, according to whom several witnesses mentioned “suspicious gas odors”.
All sources insist on the difference with a previous collapse of two buildings, unsanitary these, in November 2018, rue d’Aubagne, in another district of central Marseille.
This tragedy left eight dead and traumatized the population, sparking a wave of indignation against poor housing in this city where 40,000 people live in slums, according to NGOs.
Housing Minister Olivier Klein is due to go to Marseille on Monday, after his Interior colleague Gérald Darmanin on Sunday.
