“A wall has been deformed,” says the student who raised the alarm

He kept his cool and alerted 911 earlier the collapse of two buildings in the city center of Lille this Saturday morning
. Thibault Lemay, 22, was returning from a party with friends around 3 in the morning. Arriving at his house and entering the hall, at 44 rue Pierre-Mauroy, near the Grand’Place, the student notices that the wall is cracked and warped.

“We could hear the rubble falling!”

“I’m going to visit my two roommates, we realize that the building has moved because we were no longer able to open the door at the top and we heard some rubble falling”. The three roommates, in their twenties, reunite. “We wonder and try to be pragmatic and very quickly make the decision to notify 911,” remember this student of industrial computer science.

The intervention is very fast according to what some call a “hero”: the firefighters arrive in ten minutes. “In less than thirty minutes, the entire mountain was evacuated.” Benjamin Lopard, 35, works in the Apple Store two blocks from the collapsed buildings. “We’re in a building with a lot of partygoers, so I assumed they were guys making noise.” Eventually he was woken up by the fire brigade. coming down, comes face to face with the warped wall and take a photo which he then posts on the social network Twitter. “My first instinct was to go back to my house to brush my teeth to look presentable. But when I turned on the faucet, it was dripping, so I knew something was really going on.”

Slight warning signs, “but we think it’s the charm of the old”

“When I left home at 8pm there was no sign that this was going to happen”says Thibault Lemay. “It’s an old building, things are a little moving, my front door was rubbing, but we think that’s normal and that’s the charm of the old!”, adds for his part the neighbor, Benjamin Lopard.

A makeover of the building was underway explains this neighbor, without making the connection with the collapses. You still noticed a microcrack in the placo. “Because there were jobs at the same time, it’s hard to feel alarmed by this kind of sign, which was very benign, or so I thought.” The trail of the gas leak is not privileged, according to the mayor of Lille, Martine Aubry.

Lucidity “to alert the firefighters rather than see it the next day”

Contacted a few hours after the collapses, and beforeone person is found injured and another is still wanted
this Saturday afternoon, Benjamin Lopard congratulates his neighbor who alerted the emergency services. “He had the clarity to alert the firefighters rather than telling himself he was going to bed and seeing him the next day!” Now hope be able to thank him in person. “I think he’s one of the people I said goodbye to when I left, not knowing that this guy had saved my life! I feel a real need to get in touch with him, I absolutely have to buy him a pint… I don’t even know what it is the appropriate behavior in this situation!”