(Newswire.net— April 21, 2019) — French investigators believe that the fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral began at the center of the roof and that there may have been a problem with the firefighting system, a police source told CNN.
That was discovered after reviewing a number of amateur videos and photographs of passersby that were found at the scene of the fire in Monday, the source said, adding that investigators are now concentrating on two potential fire related problems.
Firstly, there may have been a problem with fire sensors which failed to activate. The second finding according to unnamed source leads to a crane for workers on the scaffold, but the exact nature of that issue was not disclosed.
Regarding the problem of fire sensors, two police officers at the cathedral told the police that they first noticed a fire when it was already at a height of three meters in the air at around 18:40 hours, indicating that the sensors may not have worked properly, said the CNN’s police source.
The first alarm, however, rang at 18.15 hours, according to a security control investigation in Notre Dame. According to the report a signal has flashed indicating that the sensor sent a warning.
According to the police source, two officers went to check the location, but at that time they did not see anything. The fire was discovered after another alarm rang at 18.43 hours when security officers went to the top of the cathedral and saw flames.
After ruling out terrorism, Paris prosecutors are investigating whether a short circuit in the installations caused a fire that destroyed the cathedral’s roof and one of its iconic towers.
The Parisian court source said that “they do not exclude any hypothesis at this stage,” saying that this is not their only direction of investigation.
At the time of the catastrophe, the cathedral was undergoing reconstruction. Some have cast doubt that workers of the restoration company working on the 150-year-old tower that collapsed on Monday, may have caused the fire.
Four companies had signed reconstruction contracts in Notre Dame, but none of them had workers present at the time of the fire outbreak.
The fire devastated large sections of the 850-year-old building before the firefighters finally managed to extinguish it after nine hours of fighting the flames engulfing the cathedral.