The pyramid is also the visible above-ground part of the new entry system for the wider museum. Form and function.
I’ve never heard of using linseed oil on structural timbers. Is there a cite available on this?
I don’t know why you’re asking me. I never said anything about linseed oil.
They’re saying unofficially that first indications are that it was caused by an electrical fault.
I wouldn’t take that too seriously. In five years, probably part of the cathedral will be open to the public, but major restoration work will still be going on. They should be be able to hold a service there by the time of the Olympics, but full restoration will take however much time it takes.
The area around the apse, choir, and ambulatory seems to be little affected. That’s the area you need most to hold services. They will stabilize the structure and put up a temporary roof in the next few months.
It was a similar story in medieval times, while cathedrals like this were being built. Part of the building would be in use, while the rest was still being built.
When I visited France in the 1980’s I would stop in at any Gothic or Romanesque church we passed. A lot of them were still under repair from damage done in wars of the early 20th Century. Services and other things kept going on amidst the scaffolding and drop cloths. (Seems in many cases funds for rebuilding were the biggest bottleneck)
See also : the Sagrada Familia, which will be finished any day now. I’m assured.
(I actually looked it up just now and was surprised they were still *actually *building it - I could have sworn it was to remain notoriously incomplete for ever, since it’s become part of its fame and identity)
I think the poster who mentioned linseed oil was just pointing out the hazards of not properly disposing of rags or brushes used with oil-based stains or varnish. A while back we lived near a house which partially burned down from a fire which started when the owners stuffed oil stain soaked rags in an empty paint can in the garage. New construction, too - I don’t think they even had a chance to move in yet.
“Fumes” are airborne particulates. If the fire is hot enough to liquify lead, then the liquid lead will produce vapor in the same way that liquid water will produce water vapor. But as soon as that blend of hot air and hot lead vapor cools down a bit, the lead vapor precipitates into airborne particulate, generally ultrafine (diameter<100 nm). or fine (diameter < 2.5 microns). Whereas the terminal velocity for every-day sized objects like cars, planes, and skydivers is dominated by stagnation pressure, the terminal velocity for ultrafine/fine PM is dominated by air viscosity, which means the stuff falls out of the air much more slowly than you might think: a 100-nm lead particle falls at about 7 millimeters per hour. Basically you need a good rainstorm to knock this stuff out of the air.
In the ideal case, the fire is good and hot, and the resulting buoyant convection causes all of this smoke to go up very high and get dispersed in the atmosphere. The old saw is true: the solution to pollution is dilution. Factories and power plants run into trouble when their chimney isn’t tall enough and/or their exhaust isn’t hot enough to get their effluent to disperse/mix into the atmosphere. But a good hot fire like Notre Dame, or like the Houston chemical plant fire earlier this month, drives the combustion products high up, allowing them a chance to mix with ambient air and travel downwind out of the city before they start dispersing vertically up and down.
People doing restoration work would have a significant amount of training in the areas of safety and contaminant mitigation.
And unless someone knows about an electrical issue prior to the fire I don’t see how an anonymous source is anything but a WAG prior to someone actually investigating it.
I wasn’t referring to the structural timbers myself, I was more thinking art restoration work. The roof in Notre Dame wasn’t just an empty space, and one of the companies working there was an art restoration firm. Of course,I don’t know what kind of art restoration they were doing, and yes, they doubtless know correct procedures. I just raised it as the kind of thing that can and does happen,that involves no malice and no modern tech. It was exactly the kind of thing strongly suspected in thesecond Glasgow School of Art fire and that was a proper restoration job too, no doubt by staff trained as you say.
Some chemicals are so volatile that even the tiniest slip can result in a problem, even for thoroughly trained employees. My company used to keep a certain kind of brake wash on hand as a solvent; only certain employees were allowed to use it, and those employees were strictly trained on proper use, storage, and disposal methods. Despite this, it wasn’t unusual for even the most skilled employees to experience a flash fire while using the stuff. It wouldn’t surprise me if we eventually learn that something similar happened in this case.
I see the logic for a project that uses Linseed oil . I just don’t see it ever used in the attic. There were no fire-breaks in structure. It’s existence was a huge fire hazard unto itself.
What’s more likely is a fire started from a torch used to install pipe for a fire suppression system. Something like this.
Bumped.
Just got a very nice thank-you postcard from the Friends of Notre-Dame de Paris.
nice work E.H!
Taking over part of the contracts directly can have better tax benefits than writing a big check. You don’t get to be that rich by forgetting little details which can amount to one million here or there.
One of the French billionaires who pledged a lot of money (can’t remember which one) claimed that he would not claim a tax deduction.
I consider myself Le Dude.
An interesting *NYT *piece on a misinterpreted alarm and the appalling delay in getting Paris firefighters where they needed to be: Notre-Dame came far closer to collapsing than people knew. This is how it was saved. - The New York Times
From the Guardian:
The lesson from the ruins of Notre Dame: don’t rely on billionaires