Notre Dame cathedral is burning down.

Sprinklers do nothing when your roof is on fire. (I'm not aware of roof sprinklers being typical, at least.) They also have a habit of destroying the contents of a building in the interest of saving lives. Which is a laudable goal, but would have ended up doing more damage than good in this instance.

Anyway, this is a horrible loss for humanity. I hope they rebuild, and know it might take a century to do so.

We have an oil painting of Notre Dame in our dining room. It's a masterpiece of human endeavour. (The cathedral, not the painting.)

alfadriver said:

GameboyRMH said:

Damn On a related topic, I've just recently been thinking that the way humanity does museums is not smart. If we're going to jam all of our historically valuable stuff into centralized repositories, there should be much more serious protections against fire, vandalism, the occasional master theif, and even the odd sinkhole. But it seems that the average museum isn't much better protected from those things than any random business with some valuable things on the property.

Except that most museums are protected by fire suppression systems.  Whereas most churches are not.  I wonder if some older churces will look into fire suppression systems for them....  

Gameboy, I'll go into more detail tomorrow on a computer, but In many cases your perspective of how museums handle valuable artifacts doesn't actually match the reality. In some cases, though, you're right. It usually comes down to what sort of realistic budget an institution has to protect and preserve items. The funds need to come from somewhere :-/

Edit: I posted this before getting to the second page. Seems as if some of the salient (and less so) points have been brought up (balancing costs). I can go into further detail about artifact preservation and display if anyone would like.

Gary, you have said your piece in this thread and you are not contributing anything constructive. I am going to ask that you leave the thread. 

Okay, after a brief hiatus, this thread is back. 

Gary, please take a break from this thread. 

All, let’s keep the bashing French people to a minimum, please. We have GRMers over there. 

One thing that should be brought up- look at the current pictures of what is left- it very much looks like the fire fighting effort has limited the damage to mostly the roof.  They were pumping a lot of water from the river.  The inside picture that I posted on page 2 clearly shows very old wood things on the ground level that are still there.   It's also fair to note that many of the rock structure that you see from the inside actually prevented the wood from falling into the middle of the structure.  I'm sure it's not a great support system, but it did a job that it was not intended to do pretty well.

On top of that, the bell towers- where fire did break out- were both preserved and are safe.  Some fire fighting experts suggested that once the roof collapsed, that pretty much saved the towers- as it kept the fire away.

So the roughly billion euros that have been pledged for the rebuild will have some serious based to restore on.  Which is great news.

All in all- the fire fighters did managed to keep the fire mostly in the roof area.  And thanks to efforts on the ground, it sounds like most of the relics were whisked away to keep them safe.  So it's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be.  Thank God.

Wanted to add a new view- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9UeE4P3k5k

So the PFD was fighting from the inside- protecting the ground level via a robot.  And you can get a better view that more of the inside was saved especially relative to the fire we saw on the roof.  I could see 2 sections of the rock roof that has collapsed, but it appears that the result of that was extinguished reasonably quickly.  Great work.

Looks OK to me.  

pinchvalve said:

Looks OK to me.  

Wrong Notre Dame

My dad was a classically trained painter who spent a lifetime working in oils. He taught painting and drawing in his own School, privately, and at the University of Central Florida.

He once surprised me with this emphatic statement, "The great cathedrals of Europe were the finest works of art ever created."

To put my surprise in context, I present his painting of these thoroughbreds on their way to the paddock at Louisville. 

Anyone who could produce something like this had a right to weigh in on the subject. His death coincides with the fire yesterday.

In reply to Floating Doc :

That's beautiful--your dad was clearly very talented. So sorry you've lost him. And I agree--Europe's cathedrals are not only things of great beauty, they represent truly, literally monumental human efforts to communicate beauty and concepts of spirituality to the people of future centuries (plural!). That's art at its most intrinsic level.

Margie

There was a Twitter thread where a fire chief with some experience in large structure fires was weighing in - it was interesting stuff. He had a lot of good things to say about the Parisian firefighters and their skills.

One thing that was mentioned elsewhere is that the vaulted stone ceiling above the sanctuary is there to protect the interior in case the wooden/lead roof burns. Which is exactly what it did. Looking at the interior pics, almost all of the vaulting survived and that's why the interior looks as good as it does.

Some more hope- artwork is being removed today, after the fire, to put into safe keeping.  Which is a pretty clear indicator that the fire was contained on the ground level.  Pretty amazing.  IMHO, the fire fighting effort was far more effective than many give it credit.  Yes, the roof is gone.  But it could have been FAR worse.

I heard on the radio today that people have started to send in donations to help with the buildings repair. Now... I get the symbolic gesture, but I still think it is a bit misguided. Technically, the building is owned by the French state, but with an agreement with the Catholic church regarding use (obviously - what else to use it for?). I agree that the world have lost a cultural treasure, but surely a tax exempt global organization that's sitting on a few $100 billion in assets can pitch in and pay for the repair. There are many better places to send a donation to.

Torkel said:

I heard on the radio today that people have started to send in donations to help with the buildings repair. Now... I get the symbolic gesture, but I still think it is a bit misguided. Technically, the building is owned by the French state, but with an agreement with the Catholic church regarding use (obviously - what else to use it for?). I agree that the world have lost a cultural treasure, but surely a tax exempt global organization that's sitting on a few $100 billion in assets can pitch in and pay for the repair. There are many better places to send a donation to.

There are always better places to send a donation to. Why donate to a youth sports organization in a poor neighborhood when you can donate to a children's hospital? Why donate to help save starving dogs when you can donate to help starving people? Why donate to ALS when way more people are impacted by cancer? 

Torkel said:

I heard on the radio today that people have started to send in donations to help with the buildings repair. Now... I get the symbolic gesture, but I still think it is a bit misguided. Technically, the building is owned by the French state, but with an agreement with the Catholic church regarding use (obviously - what else to use it for?). I agree that the world have lost a cultural treasure, but surely a tax exempt global organization that's sitting on a few $100 billion in assets can pitch in and pay for the repair. There are many better places to send a donation to.

The Vatican wasn't paying for the restoration that was going on already.  Besides, pretty much all of the Vatican money is via donations, so this is just one that is for a specific function.

I know they weren’t paying, but they should be!

Just for the record: The wealth of the Catholic Church goes well beyond the Vatican and a good portion of it is today coming from stocks and bonds. 

Just my $0.02

In reply to Torkel :

Ok.  But that still doesn't mean that people should not donate money if they really want to do it.  It's their money, not yours.  Let them donate it however they want to.

So apparently there's a bunch of old oak trees at Versailles that are maintained to provide new beams at Notre Dame if the cathedral should catch fire. They were planted after the last time this happened, ca. 1789-1860.

That's some planning right there.

Stefan said:

So apparently there's a bunch of old oak trees at Versailles that are maintained to provide new beams at Notre Dame if the cathedral should catch fire. They were planted after the last time this happened, ca. 1789-1860.

That's some planning right there.

I'll admit, I was a bit aghast at the idea that Parisian Emergency Responder couldn't put this fire out more quickly, or that it got so bad to begin with.

That aside, it's pretty amazing all of this stuff was planned in case of a fire of this scale. Stuff like the vaulted stone roof and trees being planted specifically for repair purposes. 

I think this was largely because the builders of these cathedrals knew that they couldn't fight a fire hundreds of feet in the air in the center of a massive building. They knew that a fire like would be extremely catastrophic, but it would likely leave a shell to be repaired. They planned for disaster and prepared for rebuilding...hundreds of years ago. 

Stefan said:

So apparently there's a bunch of old oak trees at Versailles that are maintained to provide new beams at Notre Dame if the cathedral should catch fire. They were planted after the last time this happened, ca. 1789-1860.

That's some planning right there.

But I thought the French were bad at planning! 

I suspect that once your cathedral has burned a couple of times, you start considering how to deal with it.

My only thought about it is that if the plans for "fixing" the cathedral involve some tumor of glass and steel it might be time to dust off the guillotine again.

Which is usually what happens when people start throwing around the term modern like I've been seeing.

Stefan said:

So apparently there's a bunch of old oak trees at Versailles that are maintained to provide new beams at Notre Dame if the cathedral should catch fire. They were planted after the last time this happened, ca. 1789-1860.

That's some planning right there.

There's that, or you can build with steel which is more robust to fire.  And it can also be designed so that the outward pressure that required the flying buttresses would be minimal- which would help preserve the look even more.