Yesterday was the second anniversary of the disastrous fire that nearly destroyed Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral, an occasion marked by a visit (above) by French President Macron, and the start of a new phase of the building’s restoration.
Macron, center above, told onlookers that “We’re seeing here how, in two years, a huge work has been accomplished. We also see what’s remain to be done.” And that is a lot.
Despite his quick announcement two years ago that the 12th-century church would be fully restored by the time of the 2024 Olympics, a new realism has set in, and a new goal: to make it possible for regular mass and regular visits by then to a building that has another fifteen or twenty years to go before it is fully restored.
At this point, though, what has been accomplished is impressive—and expensive: at a cost of about €165 the building is now stabilized and no longer in danger of a worse collapse, which had been seriously feared in the wake of the fire and the loss of the roof. The painstaking inspection and stabilization were held up for a time by the need to remove huge amounts of lead melted off the roof, and to remove 40,000 metal scaffolding tubes that had melted into the structure.
Even the steps that lie ahead are large and will take time. For example, the decision to replace the ‘forest’ of beams that held up the old roof with similar work rather than a modern steel frame has required cutting a thousand old-growth oak trees selected in some 200 forests; they will now be trimmed to size and seasoned.
