after the collapse of a balcony in Paris, the neighbors await explanations on the causes of the accident

In front of his building, Matthieu smokes his cigarette and turns in circles. He lives on the first floor and saw the whole scene from his couch. “I heard a ‘crack’, I saw people fall, with the metal barrier and the balcony slab”he says, still affected. “The gentleman was pressed against the railing, in the inner courtyard, and the lady face down on the ground.” Friday, May 19, in the evening, the balcony of an apartment on the fifth floor of a building on Avenue d’Italie, in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, collapsed with two people on it. The sexagenarian couple is still hospitalized, in a state of absolute emergency.

Matthieu, a cook by profession, says he didn’t go to work today, still in shock. From his flowery balcony, five feet above the ground, he explains that he always found it odd that the metal railing was fixed to the concrete slab in the shape of a half moon: “I don’t find it normal, after that I’m not in this business.”

“We see that the cut is clean, that it was just placed against the wall. How can that happen in Paris today?”

Matthieu, resident of the building

at franceinfo

The other neighbors, crossed in the building, also express their concern. Gilles never uses his balcony: he explains that he didn’t immediately understand what was going on. “It was quite a ruckus! I thought it was the neighbor upstairs who threw that furniture out the window, as it has happened before. But apparently not.”

Shed “all the light” on the accident

Mireille, on the fifth floor, is shaking a little. “I’m a little traumatized”she explains in a small voice. “It may be a construction defect to be studied, there may be construction defects in the building that we do not know about.” Fattah, a former construction worker in civil engineering living on the 6th floor, agrees. “From my point of view, if there is a balcony, there is continuity of the reinforcement of the slab, and therefore an embedding of the two. But when we see the slab below, we see nothing as reinforcement”he explains.

Experts must come over the weekend to check the foundations. For its part, Paris Habitat, the social landlord who manages the building, wants “All light is shed on the reasons for this accident, the circumstances and responsibilities of which must be established as soon as possible”. In the meantime, residents have been ordered not to go onto their balconies.