I just want to stick my fingers in my ears and squeeze my eyes shut, and pretend I did not hear about this disaster. In my head I can imagine it is still there, and still the same.
That’s not the rose window, I think it’s a window in the attic above the rose window.
Sadly, construction & renovation often raises the risk of fire in old buildings. Old wood dries out and is easily combustible.
Notre Dame was a beautiful building and will be again. It may take a lot of money & years of construction, but I think it will be rebuilt.
I was initially confused when I heard the reports on my car radio. (heavy traffic and the radio was just background noise) Thought there was a fire at Notre Dame University. Took awhile to sink in they were talking about France.
Here’san articleon the restoration of York Minster’s rose window after fire. It gives some hope but of course we don’t know what remains of Notre Dame’s windows yet.
The Guardian has information from a French journalist who reports:
It’s a maybe. But at this point, I’ll take a maybe.
Hooboy, would I hate to be the one who accidentally left the acetylene torch on.
At no time did they have control of the fire. At best the fire fighters kept the airborne ash content down somewhat.
As to the weight of the water that would be a function of the dispersal pattern and that’s computer controlled. It’s not 1950.
And THIS is why helicopters weren’t dipping water out of the Seine and dumping it onto or into the cathedral. That method is designed for fighting fires in uninhabited areas
I got just a quick mention in passing at first and thought “Again?” Much of the university was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1879.
The Idiot Trump is tweeting that they should use tankers.
I wonder if the bird is okay?
Didn’t somebody do a 3D laser scan of the interior, at one point?
If so, who has the files?
Having toured the production factory of these aircraft, been shown the function of the water collection and release systems, and observed their airborne operation, I can say with confidence that they are neither computer-controlled, nor able to release water in precise, fine amounts. The water release is directly controlled by a lever in the cockpit actuating hydraulic doors. Even with precision flying and a quick on-off of the release system, you’re looking at something like a metric tonne of water falling as a unit onto a structure already weakened by fire.
To keep it from spreading over a large area, you’d have to fly very low, which is impractical and unsafe in these conditions. But if you did drop it from a low altitude, it would fall mostly as a mass, rather than dispersing into a mist of droplets, and you’d get a huge hit of water on the order of a tonne or more hitting the building more or less at once.
Water-bombers are not suited to structure fires inside cities.
He was a professor at Vassar College so they may have the records.
Large fixed-wing airtankers have complex, computer controlled retardant dispersal systems capable of both precise incremental drops and long trailing drops one-fourth of a mile or more in length. Retardant flow rates can also be controlled to vary the retardant coverage level dispersed as required by the intensity of the fire behavior and vegetative fuel type.
Whether there was a misting system or a more conventional sprinkler; it appears that the fire started above where they would be (roof); meaning they wouldn’t be able to do much.
Wrong. They’re designed for a force dump of water.
Also, there are very few buildings like Notre Dame being both extremely old & high, with only typically one floor, meaning a very high ceiling. In general, churches are bitch fires; a cathedral is only worse because, unlike your neighborhood church, they are higher than the 75’ - 100’ aerial platforms that FDs typically have. Even if they bought a medium sized bucket just for fighting a (until today) hypothetical fire in that church, a building that hasn’t burned in hundreds of years it probably wouldn’t justify the bureaucratic cost-benefit justification analysis to buy a piece of equipment that might get used once. You’d also need a helicopter staged somewhat near the city & have the crew train on that to be able to call it in on the off chance it’s needed where the most benefit would be to have their base near a rural, forested area.
Where ‘precise’ means “less that a fourth of a mile” (1300 feet, for a cathedral whose long dimension is 420 feet), and ‘incremental’ means ‘part of the load first, then another part of the load’ - fractions of 6.3 tonnes, in the case of the CL-415 France mainly uses.
“Precision air drops” on a small wildfire are very different from hitting a specific building in the middle of a city.
Some aircraft may have computer-controlled actuation of water or retardant release systems. To the best of my knowledge, the aircraft used in France do not.
Obviously, what’s needed is smart water.
It’s got electrolytes!
This may be prematurely optimistic. My parents had a small kitchen fire when I was in 7th grade. Smoke damage on everything. It penetrated our kitchen cabinets and countertops. Even the appliance finishes had baked in soot. We spent days cleaning and the baked in soot was impossible to clean. Kitchen was almost a gut job. Down the hall, in the den the floor tile had soot baked in. My mom put in carpet.
Getting rid of the soot smell was another almost impossible job. We used several coats of Kilz on the sheetrock trying to cover the soot.