The army general in charge of rebuilding Notre Dame has said it is still possible for the cathedral ravaged by fire exactly one year ago on Wednesday to reopen in 2024 as pledged by Emmanuel Macron, if everyone “rolls up their sleeves”, reports The Guardian.
Jean-Louis Georgelin insisted unexpected delays in work to restore the 13th-century cathedral to its previous glory – including the coronavirus lockdown – need not derail the five-year deadline.
“If everyone rolls up their sleeves and the work is well planned, it is conceivable that returning the cathedral to a place of worship within five years will not be an impossible feat,” he said.
“Obviously, the area around the cathedral will be far from finished, and perhaps the spire will not be completed, but the cathedral will once again be a place of worship and this is our aim.”
The fire was discovered at 6.43pm local time on 15 April 2019, at the base of a 93-metre-high (305 ft) wood and lead spire added in 1859 by the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. The flames quickly spread to the cathedral’s ribbed roof, made up of hundreds of centuries-old oak beams known as la forêt (the forest).
As it spread, horrified Parisians turned out to watch as flames roared from the edifice, lighting up the night sky. Just before 8pm, the spire collapsed onto part of the cathedral’s vaulted transept.
The question of what do with the spire, a later addition, has raged since the days after the fire. Georgelin warned that arguments over whether it should be reconstructed as before or reflect a “contemporary gesture”, as Macron suggested, risked slowing things down.
“We have to be left to get on with the work and not caught up in the controversies,” Georgelin told L’Express magazine. “The quicker the decision is made about the spire, the quicker we will be able to really concentrate on the real reconstruction. It’s important that the objectives are set.”