Heat, lack of communication and dangerous spontaneous evacuations: many passengers from line 4 of the Paris metro were stranded on Wednesday evening, some for two long hours, in overcrowded and overheated trains, an incident described as “completely exceptional” by RATP who will launch an internal investigation.
“We got stuck in unbearable heat,” testified to AFP Oussama El Cherif, 19, who wanted to reach the Odéon station in the heart of the capital. After a long wait between two stations, he resolved, like several other passengers, to “walk along the rails” to get out.
Five “very full” trains were blocked in the tunnel of line 4 from 7:25 p.m., “exceptional conditions which almost never happen”, declared to the press Agnès Ogier, director of rail services at RATP. The evacuation of all passengers was completed at 9:30 p.m. and traffic resumed half an hour later on the entire line.
Castex calls for an internal investigation
According to Agnès Ogier, this “completely exceptional incident” occurred “in the middle of rush hour” in “especially difficult” conditions for passengers when it “was extremely hot”.
THE RATP CEOformer Prime Minister Jean Castex, asked for an internal investigation which will aim to “understand the elements that generated the incident, analyze the way it was handled” as well as “the deadlines” for intervention in order to “qu such an incident not happen again “, continued the director of rail services of the board, to one year of the 2024 Olympics.
The incident followed a “damage on a train” around 6:20 p.m. The blockage of the trains (or shuttles in RATP jargon) in the tunnel forced “passengers to wait” inside “before they could be evacuated”, according to the RATP, which was unable to communicate a estimate of the number of passengers affected.
“Really borderline”
On Twitter, photos and videos showed passengers suffering from the heat in crowded trains, as well as a line of passengers evacuating along the tracks.
Françoise Rouveyrolles, 67, was going to the theater with her husband when she too found herself trapped in a train approaching the Odéon station. “It was really difficult to live, more than two hours without knowing what was there,” she described to AFP.
“In the train, there were people who were starting to feel bad, it was really borderline… Two, three people started to get angry, people were constantly activating the alarm sign”, he said. she reported, while overall evoking “an atmosphere of wisdom.”
At the time of the evacuation, he had to take a small ladder and go up the track along the side of the train. “There were a lot of us walking along the track, between the rails and the wall, (…) in single file on stones”, without seeing “much”.
“At 7:45 p.m., some travelers spontaneously evacuated” a train, according to Agnès Ogier, the other evacuations taking place under the control of RATP agents. Asked by AFP, the Paris firefighters simply told AFP that they had sent two rescue vehicles to Montparnasse and did not report any injuries.