In January 2019, a suspected leak in a buried gas pipe destroyed a building on the Rue de Trevise in the ninth arrondissement, killing four people including two firefighters. There have been several incidents of gas-related blasts in the French capital.

The blast also caused extensive structural damage to two adjacent buildings, whose residents had to be evacuated. 'Obviously we are counting on the victims to give us the first elements for investigating and understanding what happened,' Paris Prosecutor Laure Beccuau said at the scene. 'Just when our accountant was dialling the emergency number' of the gas company, 'the explosion occurred'. 'One of my colleagues noticed a strong gas smell and went outside to look,' Philippe Delorme, the head of France's Catholic Education association, whose offices are adjacent to the collapsed building, told RMC radio on Thursday. The mayor of the fifth arrondissement said a gas explosion was behind the blast, and several witnesses told AFP they had smelled gas just before it occurred.īut officials said they did not yet have enough evidence to determine the cause of the blast with certainty. On Thursday, the security cordon had been reduced, allowing journalists and gawkers closer to the heap of rubble in front of the structure, just opposite the Val-de-Grace military hospital.Ī single fire hose was still sporadically spraying the remains of the building, while some of the nearby shops had reopened. Some 70 fire engines and 270 firefighters battled the blaze before it was contained. 'The toll could have been higher,' Paris deputy mayor Emmanuel Gregoire told FranceInfo radio. It sparked a major fire that caused the building - housing a private fashion school called the Paris American Academy - to collapse.Īccording to the mother of one of the students, writing on the school's Facebook account, the classrooms were empty at the time because students were attending a Paris Fashion Week show. The shockwave knocked out windows up to 400 metres (440 yards) away. We've had to put up plastic sheets because it's raining,' she said. Everything shook,' Violeta Garesteaw, a caretaker in a nearby building, told AFP on Thursday after sweeping up glass in the courtyard. The blast occurred on Wednesday afternoon in the city's fifth arrondissement, close to the Luxembourg Gardens and at the edge of the Latin Quarter, a top tourism area in the French capital.

'The search continues for the second,' it added, cautioning: 'These figures could still change.' 'Among the two people who were being sought in the rubble, it turned out that one had already been admitted to hospital,' the prosecutor's office said. Prosecutors said around 50 people were injured in the explosion and building collapse on the Rue Saint Jacques street, potentially caused by a gas leak.

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