“Hope must hold us,” wrote Benoît Payan nearly 24 hours after the collapse of an apartment building in Marseille. A hope to which these two young men must no doubt cling, who ten hours earlier dismissed with a wave of the hand the press on the lookout for “good” testimony. No word was necessary for them to make their situation understood. With lowered heads and concerned looks, they came out of the carriage entrance behind which the crisis and reception unit for the families of victims was deployed. We are at the beginning of the afternoon on this cursed Easter Sunday and in this building of the general direction of human resources of the city of Marseilles materialized the drama whose magnitude, sensed from the first moments which followed the 00:46 explosion blowing 17 Tivoli Street. Before two bodies were extracted from the rubble shortly after midnight on Monday, eight people for sure, and perhaps a ninth, were missing under the rubble of these dwellings which did not suffer from insalubrity, announced the public prosecutor Sunday evening, shortly after 6 p.m.
Two hundred people dislodged
It is here, at 110 Boulevard de la Liberation, in the city center and a stone’s throw from rue Tivoli, that relatives without news of residents of 17 rue de Tivoli and its two adjoining buildings, 19 and 15 – both heavily damaged at the time, number 15 ending up collapsing at 7:30 a.m. This is to allow the authorities to count the missing persons. With sometimes happy endings. Adriana, a Marseillaise in her forties, had come to inquire about a resident friend of number 19, unreachable since this morning. “He’s fine,” she said, relieved. “He hadn’t had time to take his phone when he left his apartment”. Obviously, not everyone had this chance to be reassured. Like this elderly lady who came out of the building in tears, shocked, supported by two municipal police officers who helped her walk to the vehicle taking her away.
A kilometer away, at the Vallier gymnasium, one of the two “requisitioned” by the town hall to welcome and guide the dislodged from that night in hell, the Samu has set up a psychological support cell, sheltered from eyes of journalists. Over the course of the day, 200 people, evacuated from 33 buildings within the established security perimeter, were taken care of there. Three quarters of them have found accommodation with friends or family, and 50 have been referred to hotels in the city, while the emergency services ensure that the buildings near the explosion are in good condition. and which may have experienced structural damage. The time also for the windows that shattered under the effect of the blast of the explosion to be replaced.
TV, today, it’s downstairs that it’s done
On these two sites, people from Marseille came spontaneously to offer their help. “Blankets, clothes, I came to see what they might need,” explained Paulette, who left with a phone number on a post-it. Like Paulette, several of them came to “see what they could do”. A surge of citizen solidarity that began to structure on Sunday evening the association of parents of students of the Franklin Roosevelt school, on which the inhabitants of the rue de Tivoli and its surroundings depend (contact: [email protected]) .
In the streets adjacent to that of Tivoli, where dozens of fire and police vehicles are parked, the acrid smell of fire smoldering under the rubble reigned everywhere, making the ongoing disaster all the more sensitive. Neighbours, witnesses, residents and curious people followed one another throughout this sunny Sunday behind the rubalises delimiting the large security perimeter. Along it, Aïda was walking her dog before stopping near the command post truck of the firefighters next to that of the satellite link. Aïda lives on rue Horace Bertin, a second-curtain perpendicular to rue de Tivoli. This Marseillaise returned shortly after midnight from the Easter holidays spent with her son. “I was in front of the TV, I heard boom. I believed in a bomb and I thought of everything except a collapsed building, ”she rewound. “I pray that they find survivors”, she added, observing the impressive device deployed and the media circus accompanying it. TV, today, it’s at the bottom of her home that she makes herself. And like Aïda, many of them described “a clap of thunder”, their “shaking building”, “the flashing lights in the night”, “the dust that invades everything”.
Two bodies extracted from the rubble
In the raking light of this end of the day, the journalists, who came in large numbers and some of them came down from Paris to cover the current events of this sad weekend, organize their TV set opposite the command post of the firefighters. Benoît Payan, transformed into directors of relief operations in his capacity as chief of the battalion of marine firefighters, continues to speak to the rhythm of live broadcasts. He knows that a strong moment is at stake here, if not THE moment of his mandate, conquered with the Printemps Marseillais, in particular on the ruins of the collapses of the rue d’Aubagne. On the bridge from two o’clock in the morning, the mayor displays drawn features, a sincerely serious expression and an exhaustion that he is struggling to contain. In addition to the drama in progress, he had to manage at the end of the morning the disaster in Marseilles of Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, who would have liked to see, in vain, this sequence “closer to the operations to be filmed, according to some indiscretions.
As night fell and throughout it, the rescue and clearing operations involving one hundred firefighters, all their technical means and their know-how continued with the help of searchlights. It was under their white lights that the rescuers extracted two bodies from the rubble shortly after midnight on Monday. This research “will take several days”, explained Admiral Lionel on Sunday evening. However, “there is hope, we are in action and as long as there is hope, relief operations will continue”, affirmed the admiral. The hope of finding survivors. Survivors of this sinister Easter Sunday, this black Sunday, this Sunday in hell.