30 years after the Furiani disaster, the living memory of the survivors

“That night I didn’t sleep“. Paul Calassi is a survivor of the Furiani disaster of May 5, 1992. Thirty years ago, he was in the Bastia stadium when the stands collapsed, killing 19 people and injuring more than 2,350. Like every year , Paul dreads this date of commemoration.”That night, I couldn’t sleep. I find all this stress, all this anxiety…“

On May 5, 1992, time stopped at 8:23 p.m. with the collapse of the North stand of the Stade Armand Cesari.
What was supposed to be a party became the Furiani Catastrophe, plunging Corsica into mourning.
30 years later, the duty to remember is stronger than ever.#memoria

– City Hall of Furiani (@MairieFuriani) May 5, 2022

Like Paul, there are many whose wounds from that moment never really healed. Karine Grimaldi, also a survivor of the tragedy, remembers the smallest details of this evening which was to turn her life upside down: the festive atmosphere before the match, the change of stands at the last moment. Finally, the vertiginous fall in a deafening crash.

“When I fell, I remember this aspiration, this shock on the ground, this noise, this hubbub, these people who shouted“. Karine was 18 years old on May 5, 1992. In the disaster, she lost her younger sister, who died in the fall. She will do three and a half years of rehabilitation, becoming a quadriplegic after the accident.

“Today, I just have to go somewhere where there are a lot of people and I feel oppressed. As soon as there is noise, it makes me jump and it revives bad times“, she says.

“I got anger, I got hate, it can’t fade.”

“I would have preferred to live another life, that’s for sure“, continues the forties. “But I needed to take on this challenge. I had to do something for my parents, for my sister who was no longer there.”

At 73, Paul Calassi, too, has had a long journey between hospitals and rehabilitation centers. Despite a lawsuit and despite the late decision taken last fall to no longer play a football match on May 5, Paul Calassi is still angry. A leg amputee, he claims to have always “hatred“: “It cannot fade because there is all my family who must bear the consequences of this disaster.”

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“Stigma still exists whether physical or psychological“, explained this Thursday, May 5 on franceinfo Didier Grassi, spokesperson for the collective of victims of the disaster of May 5, 1992.”It is a memory that cannot leave our memories and it remains anchored. It is something that stays with us constantly.“

Karine claims to be a little more peaceful today, but she has never returned to the Furiani stadium for 30 years, this place, she says, where she lost everything.