After a real race against time, the firefighters extracted on Wednesday from the rubble of the collapsed building of Sanary-sur-Mer, in the Var, the bodies of the two missing, bringing to three dead the a priori final toll of this explosion without doubt due to gas. For 36 hours, the emergency services have been working to meticulously clear the rubble of this small three-storey building that fell like a house of cards Tuesday at 3:42 am, after an explosion heard up to eight kilometers according to the police.
Palpable emotion in the seaside resort
As of Tuesday morning, a mother and her 11-month-old baby were quickly found alive. But the father, in his thirties, was found lifeless shortly after, fatally shot in the neck by a part of the roof structure. Time was running out to find the other two missing, conceded Tuesday Colonel Eric Grohin, the fire chief of the Var, while the dogs of the dog teams dispatched to the site did not give “signs” of life. For the night, around forty firefighters from Var and Bouches-du-Rhône remained mobilized in the rain, with the help of a truck equipped with a mechanical arm.
The bodies of the two missing were found on Wednesday, first that of a 91-year-old woman, at around 3:40 a.m., then probably that of her 58-year-old son, more than ten hours later, AFP learned from the interim prosecutor of Toulon, Dominique Mirkovic. The man was wearing a prosthetic leg after a hunting accident, the prosecutor added. He lived on the 1st floor and his mother on the ground floor.
In this popular seaside resort on the Mediterranean rim, the emotion remained palpable Wednesday in the face of this gaping hole in the port. Because the victims were known locally, in particular the father who had settled temporarily on the third floor of the building and was the son of the owner of one of the two adjoining pancake houses.
The privileged gas leak
Only the apartment on the second floor was empty at the time of the facts: “its occupant was on a business trip”, according to the prosecution. “The 45 firefighters are disengaging as their equipment is stored to make room for demolition operations in order to secure the site at the request of the municipal authorities”, for their part said the firefighters of the Var. In total, according to the last a priori final assessment, the collapse of this building therefore left three dead and five injured, the mother, her child as well as three minor injuries in neighboring buildings.
If the cause of the collapse of the building is still officially unknown, “for the time being the hypothesis of an explosion due to a gas leak is favored, pending the result of the investigations”, specified the Toulon prosecutor’s office in its press release Wednesday afternoon. An investigation to determine the causes of death was opened on Tuesday by the Toulon prosecutor’s office. The explosion of the building, which was connected to the town gas network, is clearly visible on CCTV images, said Dominique Mirkovic, stressing that the building was not subject to any peril order.
“I thought it was a plane that had fallen,” a resident of this city of 15,000 inhabitants testified on Tuesday. The deadliest explosion in France of a building due to gas dates back to December 26, 2004, with 19 dead, in Mulhouse (Haut-Rhin). More recently, on January 12, 2019, four people, including two firefighters, were killed and 66 were injured in the explosion caused by a gas leak on rue de Trévise in Paris, in the 9th arrondissement.
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