Eleven people died on Wednesday August 9 in the morning in the fire of a holiday cottage in Wintzenheim, in the Haut-Rhin. The premises were then occupied by a group of disabled adults and their companions. Arriving at the scene in the middle of the afternoon, the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, confirmed the discovery of “eight people deceased”, three others being “still missing”.
Earlier in the day, the Haut-Rhin prefecture also reported “one person in relative emergency evacuated to hospital and one shocked person”, among the seventeen who were evacuated after the start of the disaster. An investigation for “search for the causes of death” was entrusted to the research section of the Strasbourg gendarmerie. Judging that it was still “too early” to determine the origin of the incident, the vice-prosecutor of Colmar, Nathalie Kielwasser, anticipated that the investigation will focus in particular on the accommodation conditions of the gîte and its capacity to ‘welcome.
The building welcomed two groups of adults with disabilities for the holidays, supervised by two associations originating, according to the magistrate, one from Besançon and the other from Nancy: Oxygen adapted holidays. Residents accompanied by this organization, supported throughout the year by associations helping people with disabilities, have registered for this stay individually, explains to Le Monde the town hall of Nancy, where several participants come from. . “It is an agency with which these associations have worked for a long time, recognized for its seriousness”, adds Mathieu Klein, the mayor of Nancy.
Some of the participants in the stay are monitored all year round by the Mentally Disabled Adults and Children Association (AEIM), a structure which operates in Meurthe-et-Moselle, offering full-time care over the week or over the day, depending on individual situations. “The travel agency that organized the stay is a classic holiday center organization for people with disabilities,” says Elsa L’Hote, spokesperson for the association.
The emergency services and elected officials present on the spot report the extreme rapidity of the fire which ravaged the gîte, an old barn of 500 m2 with two floors and an attic. The site suffered a “generalized conflagration”, according to the firefighters, on the spot less than fifteen minutes after the first alert, given at 6:33 a.m. the burning of this partially half-timbered building”.
The deputy mayor of Wintzenheim, Daniel Leroy, who arrived around 7 a.m., said that there was already “nothing left”. “The building was completely consumed in its upper part, the roof was completely collapsed”, developed the chosen one, evoking occupants “surprised in full sleep, everyone was asleep”. Those present on the ground floor were able to quickly leave the premises but not those who were upstairs, confirmed the secretary general of the Haut-Rhin prefecture, Christophe Marot.
The victims were found upstairs as well as in a collapsed mezzanine. Five people staying upstairs still managed to escape, according to Nathalie Kielwasser. “The difficulty [of intervention] lies in access to the levels concerned, since we have a lot of rubble, a lot of collapsed parts and a floor whose stability is very uncertain”, according to the lieutenant-colonel of the fire brigade.
This fire is the deadliest recorded in France for more than seven years. On August 5, 2016, fourteen people died in a bar in Rouen. During a birthday party in the basement of the Cuba Libre, a bar in the Seine-Maritime prefecture converted into a nightclub without authorization, two candles from the birthday cake had ignited the ceilings covered with soundproofing polyurethane foam plates, an extremely flammable material. The emergency door was closed. The two managers of the bar have since been sentenced to five years in prison, three of which are suspended.
In October 2015, 41 people died in the fire of a pensioner bus at the exit of Puisseguin, near Bordeaux. A semi-trailer had swerved to the left, hitting the oncoming vehicle. Justice resumed the investigation from scratch in February 2023, after a dismissal in 2021.