On June 21, 2023, a blast ripped through a street in the Latin Quarter of central Paris. The explosion started fires and included the collapse of a façade of a building that housed a designer school with many foreign students called Paris American Academy.
This incident comes as the French people celebrated their summer solstice with a city-wide annual music festival.
The school (Paris American Academy) was founded in 1965 and offers teaching in fashion design, interior design, fine arts and creative writing.
The witnesses at the scene described a large and deafening explosion and a subsequent rise of a giant fireball which rose several stories high on the Rue Saint Jacques, near the Notre Dame Cathedral and Luxembourg Gardens.
The Rue Saint Jacques is in the 5th arrondissement of Central Paris from the Notre Dame Cathedral to the Sorbonne University and the Val de Grace military hospital and is a few blocks away from the popular Jardin du Luxembourg.
The blast occurred at 4:55 PM, local time, just as the workers were heading home. The area is frequently visited by tourists and foreign students in early summer, but there was no indication that the foreign students were among the missing and wounded. One woman fainted after this incident occurred.
Several nearby buildings were evacuated and more than 270 firefighters were involved in the emergency response. The TV Images showed the firefighters manning hoses and aiming jets of water at the blaze and a plume of thick black smoke rose into the sky. The police rushed to the scene and formed a huge cordon at the site.
A total of 30 people were injured and the numbers included four people who are in critical condition at present. The Paris Prosecutor office said it was too early to find out the actual reason behind the blast.
In a Twitter post, the local deputy mayor Edouard Civel said the main reason behind the blast was due to a gas explosion. The witnesses revealed that there was a strong presence of gas moments before the blast.
District Mayor Florence Berthout said on French TV Channel BFM that firefighters are searching for the two people believed to be inside a building at the time of the blast. “the explosion was extremely violent,” she said, describing the pieces of glass still falling from the buildings.
A Greek-French filmmaker Costa Gavras was among the witnesses at the scene.
Rahman Oliur, who runs a food shop a few doors down from the Paris American Academy, said- “The shop shook violently; it fell like a bomb blast. Another account by Bar Worker Khal Ilsey said he heard a “huge explosion” before running into the street and seeing a violent blaze at the end of a street.
The Latin Quarter has been home to many French expatriates, musicians and writers and artists over the years. According to an Art Historian, Monique Mosser, adding that many windows in her building had been blown out by the shockwave from the blast.
Adding further, she said, “A Neighbour knocked on my door and told me that the fire brigade were asking us to evacuate as swiftly as possible, I grabbed my laptop and my phone, and I did not even think of taking my medication.”
On January 12, 2019, a powerful explosion tore through a bakery in Central Paris, killing a Spanish couple along with another Spanish woman. A total of 47 people were injured, and 10 of them were in critical condition. The blast claimed the lives of two firefighters as well.
On April 15, 2019, a fire broke out under the eaves of the Notre Dame Cathedral’s roof The fire engulfed the spire and most of the roof, but the catholic relics in the cathedral were intact and safe to an extent.
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