Judges are about to complete their instruction. They target the city of Paris and the trustee, while GrDF is put out of cause.
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Nearly three years after the explosion of devastating gas in the capital rue de Treviso (9 e arrondissement), on January 12, 2019 – one of the most serious accidents of this type ever occurred in The capital, with 4 dead, 66 wounded and hundreds of victims – the magistrates of the judicial court of Paris in charge of the case are about to complete their instruction. This is what they announced, Wednesday, November 24, to the civilian parties gathered for a day at the Paris Palace of Justice. The different parties still have about fifteen days to request additional deeds, then the file will, in principle, be sent to the Prosecutor to establish his requisitions.
At this stage, the conviction of the magistrates seems established. Building on the various reports of the experts, the last one was paid to the file at the beginning of the week, two disaster officials are clearly designated: the city of Paris and the condominium trustee of the building located at the 6th, street of Treviso, the one where the deflating occurred. Indicted in September 2020 including “homicides and involuntary injuries”, the city and the trustee should logically be referred to the Criminal Court. The responsibility of the GRDF gas distributor, a subsidiary of ENGIE, is, it, removed for the moment. As well as that of the Fayolle works company, placed under the intermediate status of witness assisted.
“The vice is tightening on the city and the trustee”, confirm several participants at the Wednesday meeting. The city of Paris, however, vehemently rejects the accusations and intends to defend themselves. “Judges take the conclusions of the experts, which we fundamentally challenge,” says Sabrina Goldman, lawyer of the town hall. The first request for counter-expertise having been refused, the city appealed, and hopes that the Chamber of Investigation will accept, by a few months, that a new group of experts examines the file. Especially since the expertises carried out in the civil, and non-criminal framework, lead to different results. The trustee has, for its part, filed an application to cancel the criminal expertise.
A water leak at the origin of the drama
According to the scenario retained by the experts and the instructors magistrates, the primary origin of the accident is to be searched in a water leak. The wastewater collector located in the basement of 6, Treviso Street fled for two years from 2015 to 2017, and the condominium was slow to react. When she finally made the repair, all cubic meters of spilled water had turned the ground, “decompacted” the ground, and resulted in a sagging in front of the building, on the public domain. It was then that the city intervened. On five occasions, his agents repaired the sidewalk, without understanding the deep cause of this disorder or solve it definitively. However, according to the experts, the collapse of the sidewalk has evil the pipeline of gas that was there. She ended up breaking on January 12, 2019, about two hours before any spark does not cause explosion, and ravage a whole neighborhood. It was 8:59.
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