
Notre-Dame came closer to collapsing than people knew - Luc
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/16/world/europe/notre-dame.html
======
rahkiin
> “You have a system that is known for its ability to detect very small
> quantities of smoke,” Mr. Corbett said. “Yet the whole outcome of it is this
> clumsy human response. You can spend a lot to detect a fire, but it all goes
> down the drain when you don’t move on it.”

It seems to me that the biggest issue with the fire system was the lack of a
graphical display of the alarm... with all the security cameras and screens
likely to already be in place, why not add one with maps of the cathedral,
showing up in red when an alarm triggers? The need to understand shortcodes it
waiting for disaster...

~~~
WalterBright
These all seem obvious now in hindsight, but that's always the way of things.
People, even educated, intelligent, and earnest people are very bad at user
interface design. Good UI design comes from experience, not foresight.

For example, the aviation industry has standard terms for things. "Takeoff
Power" means full power. Can you guess what happened? A pilot needed to abort
a landing, and yelled "takeoff power" to the copilot, who promptly chopped the
power, an accident ensued. This phrase was then changed to (I think) "Full
Power".

The Air Force didn't learn from that civil aviation incident until it happened
to them, too, then they fixed it.

It seems obvious, doesn't it? Everybody missed it.

~~~
paulcole
It all boils down to one of the simplest and most ignored truths:

Most people aren't great at their jobs, they're average or worse than average.

~~~
FooHentai
It's not possible for most people to be worse than average.

~~~
OJFord
Depends on what's meant by 'average'.

True for median, (by definition) but false for mean and mode.

~~~
afterburner
Colloquially, average only ever means mean.

~~~
OJFord
I'm inclined to agree that's what most people mean, (particularly non-STEM
people) but it seems that's not what the poster I replied to above meant.

------
JshWright
The article understates the risk the team that went to the north tower
undertook. It mentions that they might not have an escape path, but that
really doesn't communicate how exposed they were.

It's not uncommon for a fire crew to advance into an exposed position to make
an attack or search for victims. As was the case here, there is usually a
hoseline or two set up in a defensive position, covering their escape path.
The difference is, this is usually done in a comparatively small space (i.e. a
crew holding the staircase of a house while a second crew searches the
upstairs). If the defensive position starts to look at risk, the exposed crew
can make it back within a minute or two.

The crew in the northern tower of Notre-Dame would have taken far longer than
that to make it back through, and it's very likely that if the defensive
position had been lost, it wouldn't have been recognized until it was too
late, trapping the crew in the tower.

~~~
karambahh
The operations commander purposely chose personnel with no children or spouse
to go on the northern tower

The call was made knowing that there may be casualties among them

~~~
hef19898
Damn hard call to make, cudos to the people, personnel that went upt as well
as command crew on the ground, conducting that kind of ops.

~~~
omginternets
Note that the Paris Fire Brigade is a branch of the Army [0] (and in this
case, it shows).

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Fire_Brigade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Fire_Brigade)

~~~
karambahh
The only other military fire brigade is Marseilles "Marins pompiers"[0] that
are a branch of the french Navy but I believe it to be standard practice in
all fire brigades in France of which almost of all them are civilian.

Morals aside, it kind of make sense from an economical standpoint: a single
guy dies, that's sad. A father of four dies, that's sad and the community has
to support four orphans...

Controversial opinion: making that call to save living creatures is fine in my
personal moral compass. Make that call for a building, be it symbolic and of
rich cultural significance, not so much. As long as nobody is in danger, do
everything to save it but if it burns to the ground, it can be rebuilt. A lost
life and its consequences cannot.

I was, honestly, furious, when I heard the commander chose to send his men
into the northern tower simply to save a pile of rocks....

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marseille_Naval_Fire_Battalion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marseille_Naval_Fire_Battalion)

~~~
garmaine
Historical context and original artifacts cannot be simply rebuilt. This is
not an office complex or a scientific lab or some other property that has
material value but consists of fungible parts. Original historical artifacts
of this type are literally irreplaceable.

If they are destroyed, they are lost to every future human being from now
until the end of the universe. Even with time discounting, that's a great
cultural loss. Should we risk lives to preserve historical & cultural
heritage? Yes, absolutely.

~~~
bleuarff
Or, perhaps cynically, being one of the most visited monument in the world, it
has a non-negligible economic value for Paris and France. Is that worth a few
lives?

------
james_pm
Interesting that during the fire, the world was piling on the fire fighting
efforts as being insufficient. As the true picture started coming out over the
next few days and now with this article, it's clear that the fire fighters had
a plan and executed it well, likely saving the structure.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
The world? IIRC it was pretty much just one person...

~~~
Raphmedia
A lot of people on online boards (including HN) were critical of the
firefighting efforts.

~~~
JshWright
It's definitely interesting to go back and look at the conversation that day.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666991](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666991)

------
acqq
The part interesting for us:

“The fire warning system at Notre-Dame took dozens of experts six years to put
together, and in the end involved thousands of pages of diagrams, maps,
spreadsheets and contracts, according to archival documents found in a
suburban Paris library by The Times.

The result was a system so arcane that _when it was called upon to do the one
thing that mattered — warn “fire!” and say where — it produced instead a
nearly indecipherable message._ ”

The message (assembled):

“Attic Nave Sacristy.” “ZDA-110-3-15-1” “aspirating framework”

~~~
9dev
That's really a textbook example of software projects going horribly wrong.
It's often a good idea to take a step back and analyze whether you're
overcomplicating things. Often when working on a concept, you're too deep in
to see the simple solutions anymore.

~~~
nolok
Beer testing has never looked saner than when faced with monstruosities like
that.

Been using it since I learned of it on HN and it's impressive the number of
times it makes you take a step back and realize you were getting lost between
you and yourself.

~~~
arethuza
"Beer testing" \- usability testing after consumption of quantities of beer??

~~~
GuB-42
Apparently, it is a different thing.

What I thought of was:

\- State the problem

\- Get drunk

\- Find an answer

\- Sober up

\- Study the problem again

\- If you came to the same conclusion as when you were drunk, you are OK.

~~~
jawilson2
Basically how the Persians used to debate: "In Herodutus’ discussion of the
Persians, he wrote (Book I, chapter 133) that they decide upon important
issues by first getting drunk. Once drunk, they start the debate and then come
up with a decision. The next day when they are all sober, they decide whether
they want to go through with the decision made. If yes, they go through with
it. If they decide against it, they drop it and go back to square one which
starts by getting drunk again."

[1] [https://historydaily.org/drunks-debates-ancient-
persia](https://historydaily.org/drunks-debates-ancient-persia)

------
mshook
Ok so the UI or procedures sucked but what's really aggravating as a tax
payer, at least to me, is the lack of foresight and proper funding where it
matters. Though to be honest it's not different from most work environments...

Fire is not something new for historical monuments.

I heard on the radio right after the collapse an architect saying at least
half of fires starting on historical monuments happen during renovations. And
quickly searching shows an insurance company saying it could be close to 3/4
of them ([https://www.cahiers-techniques-batiment.fr/article/notre-
dam...](https://www.cahiers-techniques-batiment.fr/article/notre-dame-les-
travaux-de-renovation-sont-la-cause-de-trois-quart-des-incendies-des-
batiments-historiques-claude-delahaye-directeur-de-la-construction-chez-
verspieren.40370)).

Sure that wouldn't have fixed everything but now instead of adding a couple of
dozens or hundred millions to fund the fire warning system, we're now most
likely looking at a cost of multiple billions...

~~~
WalterBright
> Fire is not something new for historical monuments.

I worry about the great libraries being consumed by fire. I do not understand
why there isn't a larger effort to digitize them.

~~~
manwe150
Isn’t part of the problem here copyright, so Congress would need to make it
legal? I thought that’s what killed the Google Books effort anyways.

That said, I thought the Internet Archive is still engaged in an ambitious
project to scan many books
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_scanning](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_scanning)).

~~~
WalterBright
Things like the Vatican Library, which are full of old manuscripts that are
centuries out of copyright and nobody even really knows what's all there.

------
segmondy
Amazing read, goes to show that fighting fire is not just about pointing a
hose to the fire. There's a lot of strategic decision that has to be made.
When you have multiple fire, which one do you point the hose at, where you
position yourself, in what order do you fight them? You can't just look at the
fire, but everything around it. Timing matters, I suppose SRE's can relate.
But I believe developers can also learn from this by doing a lot of
introspection.

~~~
JshWright
Relatedly... I have a foot in both worlds (part-time firefighter/paramedic,
full-time dev/ops/SRE/etc). For the better part of a year now I've been
kicking around the idea of a conference talk about the transferable lessons
between the two.

~~~
dreamcompiler
Fantastic idea. When firefighters screw up, people die. So we have a large set
of very practical guidelines and most of them exist because somebody died.

I'd love to see outages (for example) managed with the Incident Command (IC)
system. Maybe some companies do this already, IDK. But IC works very well in
any "WTF is happening?" emergency situation.

~~~
JshWright
Yeah, topics like that have already been covered fairly well. I'm more
interested in "tactical" level discussions. Avoiding (or accounting for)
tunnel vision, having muscle-memory level familiarity with your tools, the
importance of pre-planning, etc. Specific things that can be meaningful to an
individual or small team.

------
vnchr
Have they figured out how the fire started?

~~~
mr_crankypants
According to TFA, no, but they are nearly certain it was accidental. Top
candidates include faulty electrical wiring and cigarette butts.

~~~
lutorm
Given the prevalence of construction-initiated fires and the risk of fire in
that space, I'm really surprised they even allowed smoking there.

~~~
canthonytucci
Sometimes people break rules.

~~~
noir_lord
Almost invariably they break rules, that’s why sane systems have redundancies
and contingencies for “what do we do when meatsack A fails to follow the
rules?”.

Sometimes the answer is nothing (the result of the rule break may be minor)
other times not.

------
briantailor
This will be an example to for future fire systems that will be updated in
many historical sites

------
mytailorisrich
I saw a TV report today and they still don't allow people under the part of
the roof that collapsed.

Currently they are clearing the rubbles there using remote-controlled robots.

------
jedberg
I didn’t see any mention of basic testing happening.

I’d hope that they were doing constant readiness drills.

Every couple of weeks they should have sent someone up to trigger a sensor and
see how long it takes for someone to show up.

------
anbop
I don’t know what they meant by closer than people knew. I heard the news, saw
the pictures, and went to bed assuming it would be completely gone by the
morning.

------
theon144
Can I just take a moment to praise the article's presentation?

This comes up every time a NYTimes interactive comes out but _wow_ , the
narrative flow on this one really is incredible. The animations smoothly
transitioning to full text, the collage of socal media posts... It feels much
more like watching a documentary than reading an article.

I hope this catches on, it's what I've been promised with this whole
hypermedia shebang!

~~~
js2
"Snow Fall" was, I think, the NYT's first serious effort at a multimedia
article:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Fall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Fall)

Similar comment at the time:

> The NYT just kinda blew my mind. A newspaper article just blew my mind. This
> is, by far, the best multimedia storytelling I think I've ever seen. Kudos
> to the team involved in putting this together, you've shown me the future of
> media and the internet.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4951041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4951041)

I don't really understand how the same paper does these incredible articles
and then totally whiffs on other attempts such as:

[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/07/arts/dance-
da...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/07/arts/dance-dance-
revolution.html)

~~~
supernova87a
This has nothing to do with the quality of that NYT avalanche reporting, or
the technology -- but I was more than a little surprised how they dedicated
that much staff time, resources, and production to that story.

After all, this was a story about how people engaging in a purely _voluntary_
(and mind you, luxury) sport were causing and encountering avalanches. Hardly
the most exposé-of-power, human-nature-revealing, check-on-society pieces of
journalism. Just stop hiking off trail to go snowboarding on unstable
mountains! Sheesh.

~~~
pdpi
Imagine piloting that format on a _serious_ story, and the ensuing backlash if
the format was ill-received.

Doing this work on a "low-stakes" story means that you have more room to
experiment.

~~~
supernova87a
Well, that's a good point. And I'm sure the journalist writing the story had
tons of material he/she was eager to see "in print". Let a writer fill up
10,000 words and he will.

------
chaosbolt
>Paris has endured so much in recent years, from terrorist attacks to the
recent violent demonstrations by Yellow Vest protesters.

Seriously? Putting the terrorist attacks in the same context as the Yellow
Vest protests? One is an attack on civilians by extremist foreign groups, the
other is those citizens protesting against a government decision that hurts
them, which is a constitutional right in both France and the US... And this
right to protest is what arguably made France a republic in the first place
and led many other countries to follow on its steps. And labeling the protest
as violent is dishonest at best, the police were violent and started throwing
tear gas grenades at people, which made many protesters lose a hand or an eye
(only the ones I saw, I'm sure there are many others who weren't recorded and
put on Youtube).

~~~
emptyfile
>Seriously? Putting the terrorist attacks in the same context as the Yellow
Vest protests?

Um, yes? People died in protests, and many terrorists were from France or
Belgium.

------
devtul
My birthplace is roughly 9439km or 5865 miles from Paris, yet I hold back
tears while reading and remembering the tragedy.

------
uncletaco
Shame on me for thinking they were talking about the college's football team
at first. I was like "It hasn't already?". Roll tide.

