Followed, luckily, by a tale of extremely competent and brave firefighters.
Go check for fire, the guard was told. He did and found nothing.
It took nearly 30 minutes before they realized their mistake: The guard had gone to the wrong building. The fire was in the attic of the cathedral, the famed latticework of ancient timbers known as “the forest.”
The fire warning system at Notre-Dame took dozens of experts six years to put together, and in the end involved thousands of pages of diagrams, maps, spreadsheets and contracts, according to archival documents found in a suburban Paris library by The Times.
The result was a system so arcane that when it was called upon to do the one thing that mattered — warn “fire!” and say where — it produced instead a nearly indecipherable message.
Followed, luckily, by a tale of extremely competent and brave firefighters.
Followed, luckily, by a tale of extremely competent and brave firefighters.