Despite authorities ruling that the Notre Dame fire was “accidental,” it remains a mystery as to what started the blaze that engulfed and nearly destroyed the 850 year old gothic cathedral.
Despite police asserting that an electrical short circuit was the probable cause of the fire, Europe Echaffaudage said that the electricity supply to the two lifts on the site “was perfectly within specifications and well maintained”.
The company added that workers had cut power to the elevators when they left the site at 5:20pm, an hour and a half before the fire started.
Electrical wiring that ran through the roof of the cathedral was also up to standards.
“Nothing was ever done without the authorisation of the state…There were no wires dangling, everything was properly installed,” Notre-Dame spokesman Andre Finot said.
A scaffolding firm that worked on the site said that some its employees did defy rules by smoking, but asserted that it was impossible for a cigarette butt to burn oak beams.
“We condemn it. But the fire started inside the building… so for company Le Bras this is not a hypothesis, it was not a cigarette butt that set Notre-Dame de Paris on fire,” Le Bras Frères spokesman Marc Eskenazi said.
The Paris prosecutor’s office re-iterated that it had not ruled out any hypothesis about the origin of the fire and that all possibilities were still being explored.
Meanwhile, Notre Dame may be facing an even bigger threat than the fire itself – modernist architects who plan to rebuild the cathedral to reflect France’s new “diversity”.
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