Damage at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris is mercifully less than expected, but it will still cost millions of dollars for even a temporary roof repair, says a heritage expert.
A fire ripped through the 850-year-old Gothic cathedral on April 15, destroying the wooden roof and towering spire, while damaging the historic artifacts inside. Renovation work on the UNESCO World Heritage Site monument is suspected to have caused the blaze.
“It is not as bad as (we) might have feared,” said Rod Stutt, president of the Architectural Heritage Society of Saskatchewan and program head of the architectural program at Saskatchewan Polytechnic.
There are two roofs on the cathedral. The outside roof is made of wood and is what was destroyed. Inside is a secondary roof made of stone. That stone vault remained intact and protected many of the artifacts and furniture below.
Furthermore, stone does not burn when engulfed in fire, but it does crack, said Stutt. The shell of the building will have to be checked for damage. Yet, the fact firefighters extinguished the blaze before it reached the two stone towers means the cathedral’s shell could exist for another couple of centuries.
In the short-term, there will be smoke and water damage to the artifacts. It will take at least 40 years and millions of dollars to restore paintings and other items. However, Stutt says the roofs should be the easiest parts to rebuild.
“It is a building that is important to the French identity and European identity,” he said. “It drew people together when they realized what was being lost. It brought a shared sense of national mourning and national purpose.
“That’s positive.”
What disappoints Stutt is seeing a heritage building crumble due to neglect or people not understanding its worth. However, he thinks it’s great to see the world rallying around the cathedral; the fact C$1 billion was raised in less than two days shows people care about Notre Dame.
The cathedral’s shell was built of stone because that’s how churches were built nearly 1,000 years ago, explained Stutt. Fires used to ravage wood structures, so the builders constructed Notre Dame using stone so it would survive something like this.
Architects will probably use a metal frame to re-build the roof, while other modern features such as sprinklers will also be installed, he said. The roof will look the same on the outside, while visitors will still see the stone vault ceiling inside.
“They could easily substitute new materials and few people would know the difference,” he added.
The estimation that it will cost billions of Euros to repair the entire building sounds right, Stutt said. But a temporary roof that takes five years to build and lasts 10 years could cost hundreds of millions of dollars and be a better solution.
Notre Dame — along with other European cathedrals — has survived much worse, Stutt pointed out. The monument survived the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and two World Wars.
The cathedral in Cologne, Germany, for example, was destroyed during the Second World War. However, nearly 80 years later, it has been rebuilt.
Many of the items inside Notre Dame that were destroyed — including the wooden spire on the roof — date back to only the 1840s, when the cathedral was undergoing restoration, Stutt added. There are artifacts from that time period that could be used to replicate similar pieces from inside.
Parisian authorities are still investigating the fire.
