LILLE. After the collapse, on the morning of Saturday November 12, 2022, of a building housing two buildings in Lille, the emergency services extracted the lifeless body of a victim during the night from Saturday to Sunday. The cause of the tragedy is unknown for the moment, and an investigation has been opened by the Lille prosecutor’s office.
[Mis à jour le 13 novembre 2022 à 11h22] The city of Lille is in shock, after the discovery of a lifeless body in the rubble of the building containing two buildings which collapsed on the morning of Saturday November 12, 2022. Indeed, on the night of Saturday to Sunday , around 1:30 am, “the body of a man was discovered in the rubble”, explained Stéphane Beauventre, commander of the relief operations, according to comments reported by The voice of the North. According to the daily, it would most likely be Alexandre Klein, a 45-year-old head psychiatrist, who was reported missing on Saturday. He worked at the Calais hospital center. According to Stéphane Beauventre, the doctor “could have slipped during his sleep”. An official investigation will however have to determine the precise circumstances of his death. On the spot, “the scene is now frozen for the purposes of the investigation”, indicated the commander of the relief operations.
As a reminder, Saturday morning around 9:15 a.m., a building made up of two adjoining three-storey buildings collapsed. It was located in the heart of downtown Lille, between numbers 42 and 44 rue Pierre-Mauroy, just a few meters from the Grand’Place, one of the most touristy places in the northern city. It was Thibault Lemay, a 22-year-old student, who alerted the emergency services on returning home, to one of the two collapsed buildings, on the night of Friday to Saturday around 3 a.m. France Blue North questioned him. He explained that he noticed on returning that the wall of the hall of the building was ajar and warped, and decided to warn the municipal police and the firefighters, who then evacuated one of the two buildings in which residents were staying. . Benjamin Lopard, one of Thibault Lemay’s neighbors, was thus awakened by the firefighters, who asked him to leave the premises. Arriving in the lobby of his building, the neighbor took some shots of the warped wall which you can find below:
Why was the victim not evacuated like the others? “He was staying at 42 and not 44, and this building, which did not present any apparent risks, was not evacuated”, explained a source familiar with the matter to The voice of the North. The man was reportedly hosted by a colleague. “We contacted all the owners. Some were on the coast, others in Calais… One of them confirmed to us that he had lent his apartment at 42 to a colleague as part of a promotion meeting “, indicated Stéphane Beauventre. The owner transmitted the telephone number of the colleague he was hosting to the emergency services, who found that he was not answering. Moreover, his car had remained in the garage, and he had not taken his Saturday penalty. His phone had also bounded in the area of the collapse. So many clues that prompted the firefighters to continue their research. On Saturday, firefighters also said another victim was pulled out of the rubble. Fortunately, she was only slightly injured according to the emergency services. The cause of the collapse is not known at this time. The Lille prosecutor’s office said it had opened an investigation for “endangering the lives of others”. “A judicial expertise has been commissioned to shed light on this case,” said the prosecution.
An alert that saved lives?
Thibault Lemay, a 22-year-old work-study student in industrial computing, gave the alert to the emergency services. He told to France Blue North how he noticed, on returning home on the night of Friday November 11 to Saturday November 12 around 3 a.m., that the wall of the building’s lobby was ajar and warped. “I’m going to see my two roommates, we realize that the building has moved, because we could no longer open the door at the top and we heard rubble falling”, explained Thibault Lemay to our colleagues. The three roommates then made the decision to notify the emergency services. The 22-year-old student says that the firefighters arrived ten minutes later, and that they evacuated the people present in one of the two buildings “in less than 30 minutes”.
Before we learned that the lifeless body of a victim had been found in the rubble, the mayor of Lille Martine Aubry praised the responsiveness of Thibault Lemay: “I’m still shaking because if this night, this gentleman had not returned at 3am, and had not joined us, and that we had not had these reactions, there would be deaths this (Saturday) morning obviously. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin also thanked “the student who sounded the alarm last night”.
What is the cause of the collapse?
According The voice of the North, the Minister Delegate for Housing, Olivier Klein, declared that “there was no particular alert on this building, it was not a building affected by insalubrity”. We know, however, that a facelift was underway on one of the two buildings, according to information from France Blue North. Jean-Yves Méreau, Lille heritage and town planning specialist, was interviewed by The voice of the North on this collapse: “I do not know in this specific case what work has been carried out, but there is a real problem of destructuring of plots in Old Lille (building district). We too often remove load-bearing walls to enlarge commercial surfaces. However, in Lille, the facades do not support the buildings.” “This creates a load-bearing problem because the loads are returned to points that are too weak and, afterwards, the walls creak. The services of the city of Lille have been fighting against this mania of removing load-bearing walls for years”, a- he added.
The voice of the North also interviewed Marc Dumont, a teacher in town planning at the University of Lille. “There’s a fair amount of run-down buildings in the city,” he said. In the afternoon of Saturday, the Lille prosecutor’s office announced that it had opened an investigation for “endangering the lives of others”, adding that a “judicial expertise has been commissioned to shed light on this case” . Olivier Klein, Minister Delegate for Housing, announced on BFM TV that he was going to Lille on Monday. “We can hold work meetings and see if we have other buildings in danger, launch the necessary investigations and try, with the mayor and the prefect, to be useful and to understand what happened for prevent such a tragedy from happening again,” he said.