Nearly twenty-four hours after the gigantic explosion which blew up a four-storey building in Marseille, the emergency services found, on the night of Sunday April 9 to Monday April 10, the lifeless bodies of two people.
“Given the particular difficulties of intervention, the extraction [of the bodies from the site] will take time”, specified the firefighters in a brief press release, confirming information from the newspaper La Provence and the BFMTV channel.
“The judicial authority may then proceed to the identification” of these victims, continues the text. “A status update will be made early in the morning,” the statement concluded.
“This night the pain and the pain are great”, reacted in a press release the mayor of Marseille, Benoît Payan. “We continue to do everything to carry out the rescue operations”, he continued, assuring that “all the services of the City, accompanied by the services of the State, are always, at this very moment, fully committed to further research”.
Eight people, who lived in the building, are sought by the rescuers who continue their operations at night in the light of searchlights, helped by a crane, after having been slowed down from the start by a persistent fire under the rubble. The intervention of the rescue dogs was complicated by these conditions and they had not yet “marked” the presence of possible victims by the end of the evening, according to the firefighters.
An adjoining building collapsed
The explosion, “extremely violent” according to the Marseille prosecutor, Dominique Laurens, occurred at 12:46 a.m. on the night of Saturday to Sunday, as evidenced by the surveillance cameras which captured it. 17 rue de Tivoli, a building housing five apartments in a rather residential area of ??the city center, was completely blown up. The two adjoining buildings were badly damaged, but all their occupants were able to escape or be saved by the firefighters.
One of these buildings collapsed later in the day, burying the scene under even more rubble but without injuring the rescuers. The other is also threatening to collapse.
The authorities fear that eight residents of the blown building who “do not respond to calls” from their relatives will be buried under the rubble, the prosecutor told the press, who opened an investigation entrusted to the judicial police. Those missing are “people of a certain age and a young couple in their thirties,” but there would be no children or minors, Laurens said. She also mentioned a ninth person “who is currently wanted at 19 rue de Tivoli”.
Five people were lightly injured and a total of 33 “affected”, authorities said. A sign of the devastating effects of the explosion, 199 inhabitants of the district – representing 90 households – had to be evacuated and 50 requested emergency rehousing.
