Emir wrote:
It’s as heavy as water (even a bit heavier). The water also looks like spray when dropped out from firefighting aircraft but actually the force of hitting the ground is pretty high.
Good to know, thanks. Actually round here the red fire retardant somehow looks like it dispersed more than the water. Sadly, here in California, we have ample opportunity to witness these drops.
Sadly, here in California, we have ample opportunity to witness these drops.
We have forest fires here in Croatia (although we were pretty lucky last summer) but nothing comparable to California. Our guys use mainly seawater because retardant is too expensive and filling the aircraft takes too much time.
Retardant makes also all that was covered practically unusable.
A friend of mine is insurance expert, and after fire near Aix en Provence last year, one’s house has been sprayed with retardant as the garden with specific trees. The house is still here, but all walls must be recovered even untouched by flames, retardant went in the house and all things in are unsafe for indoor used, and trees are all dead.
Knowing that Notre dame was made of wood and stone, I bet all wood things would be unsafe.
8 years ago, the city hall of La Rochelle got the same treatment, and same solution, firemen couldn’t go inside and no Canadair.
The fact that it is in the city and the spray could touch people’s house is also a danger.
It looks that with all the damage they have they ended up avoiding the total loss of the cathedral. It will be very extensive work to rebuild it but at least it is not lost totally.
By the looks of it, the fire was triggered by welding work up in the roof section, spread like crazy over the whole roof area, no way to stop that. Dumping water on it would collapse the ceiling worse than the latest pics show it’s been damaged. Looking at the inside pics, they shaved a total disaster only very closely. It’s actually amazing how much of the interior is still there, wet but otherwise in restorable condition. What I also only realized this morning is that the fire actually spread to the north tower where they managed to save the belfry just about… they were really worried that this would go up in flames sending the ton heavy bells falling down, which they reckogned would probably have collapsed the whole tower.
I recall several such fires, one in my home town some years back, close copy of this one. Welding work in the roof structure, roof structure went up in flames and collapsed the inner ceiling. It took some years to rebuild it and it was far from as complex. Looks like in Notre Dame large parts of the inner ceiling did indeed hold, even though there are now pictures which suggest there is a huge hole where the tower structure fell. They say the altar and the organ are intact, as well as most of the relics were saved as well. I’d think it was a fantastic job by the local fire brigade.
Some sources say that the church had been in disrepair for a while and French authorities acted too slow to ensure better fire safety. However, with the renovation works going on up there, that has to be taken with a bucket of salt, roof renovations are notoriously dangerous and lead to such blazes all to often. Once started, these kind of fires are basically not stoppable, only partly containable. That is what happened and the fire brigade can be very proud of their accomplishment of saving not only the structure of the church but also most probably a lot of buildings close to it…..
Safe retardants exist but they come at price e.g. http://aquastatin.com/en/novest/ (it’s not advertisement – I’m just aware of this product from Serbia).
