Temple of Ranma's Sailor Senshi Seifuku

https://www.thelocal.fr/20190415/major-fire-at-paris-historic-notre-dame-cathedral

Looks like the Notre Dame in Paris is either severely damaged or possibly destroyed. Supreme bummer.

I saw the tallest spire crumbling on television. This is not good.

One news article says the paintings and relics were saved. I mourn the stained glass.

Less worry there 60% of the stained glass was off site for restoration work and I don't know if any was installed at the moment where the fire has been.

Where the fire has been... That's pretty much the whole thing: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/0 ... cathedral/

We'll have to see what the tally of damages and lost items are going to come to. Heard that atleast part of the stained-glass windows melted, or were atleast damaged. The whole oak roof from the 13th centure is gone, the spire (added in the 19th centure) is gone. Some copper statues that were part of the spire were just sent off to the Dordogne for restauration, so that seems saved.

Some priest also seems to have indicated that the art and relics are mostly in 'the vault', so most of that seems saved. Beyond that, those cathedrals were built with disaster in mind. So it's carcass is pretty sturdy. As it seems now that survived. But the damages are anyone's guess at the moment.

Fund got started to collect money for the rebuild already. One rich Frenchman already pledged 100 million to the efforts. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... notre-dame

And of course it was so hard to install gas or foam based fire suppression systems in that highly flammable national treasure...
█████ hypocritical have-nots
I saw news reports. It was slowly falling apart for years because of insufficient funding.

Cheb wrote:And of course it was so hard to install gas or foam based fire suppression systems in that highly flammable national treasure...
█████ hypocritical have-nots
I saw news reports. It was slowly falling apart for years because of insufficient funding.

Yeah, although to be fair, the estimated cost of complete restorations(before the fire) was already heading towards astronomical scales, as in, the budget of Paris even if taken as a whole wouldn't even begin to be enough, which was why they started some more limited renovations recently. (heck, if the higher estimates on the costs were true, the French NATIONAL budget would be strained to pay for it)

I agree that fire suppression SHOULD have been an obvious thing. OTOH, i've seen the arguments against that elsewhere, as the conservationists absolutely hate even the idea of the work needed to fit those kind of stuff to buildings.
But better funding for upkeep and at least basic fire suppresion, really should have been.

The fire suppression systems safe and allowed by regulations in France (Many just following along with the UNguidances) made it so installing any suppression system safe for the public to be exposed to would have required using the options just about as damaging to the art as the fire was. They argued 5 years ago that it was better that they not add something potentially harmful to the congregants.[/color]

Spokavriel wrote:The fire suppression systems safe and allowed by regulations in France (Many just following along with the UNguidances) made it so installing any suppression system safe for the public to be exposed to would have required using the options just about as damaging to the art as the fire was. They argued 5 years ago that it was better that they not add something potentially harmful to the congregants.[/color]

Yeah, and i think part of the argument was also that there was a far far greater risk that there would be a false release on the fire suppression than that there would be a fire, so using "visitor friendly" types would be almost guaranteed to cause damage far too often.
And the kind of suppression that is safe for the building and art, well i guess that would be CO2 or inert gas or some such, and no, those can definitely absolutely not be placed anywhere with public access.

Still, even a slightly more expensive but still very basic water-mist suppression system could have made a huge difference, even if you put it on manual release only.

Spokavriel wrote: Haylon was the one that would ensure no damage to artifacts but you know its almost worse than Carbon Monoxide poisoning for humans that get caught in it.

Since I was present for a Halon release in a museum vault, I can testify that it is nowhere as dangerous as carbon monoxide - and even a release of gaseous Halon is far from clean. It came out of the pipes in quite a rush, picked up everything both light and loose, and strewed it all over. I don't recall any damage to artifacts, but it was a mess to clean up.

There are lots of halons, some safer than others. Carbon tetrachloride is a halon, and it doesn't have a good reputation these days, though it used to be sold for household use. There are a couple halons (1211 and 1301) that are used in fire suppression, and they're relatively safe. 1301 is the gaseous kind that would be used for computer rooms and the like. Because halon is a CFC, just like freon, it hasn't been manufactured since 1994. It is being recycled, but getting more expensive as time goes on.

Using a halon fire suppression system in a place like Notre Dame Cathedral? It's a big place, lots of volume, and since halon 1301 is heavier than air it would not go directly to the roof where the fire was. Better to use it in more limited spaces like computer rooms and airplanes. It's good stuff, but it's a good stuff we can't have any more of.

For the particular situation in Notre Dame, helium would have worked better - it would go straight to the roof where the fire was. But we're wasting enough helium using it for fire suppression would be dumb, dumb, dumb unless you had a precog to tell you where it'd be needed. We're wasting too much helium on birthday balloons anyway. I'm more worried about peak helium than peak oil.

Spokavriel wrote: Helium is at least chemically producible with less limited resources.

Helium can't be produced chemically. It's a product of radioactive decay (on Earth) or nuclear fusion (in the Sun). The only way we can get it, on Earth, is through a coincidence: a bed of natural gas held in strata made of radioactive rock. The rock doesn't have to be that radioactive - it has millions of years to do its decaying while the stratum just sits there - but the effect is simple. Some natural gas wells have helium as well as natural gas.

If you have helium in your natural gas, you can separate it out. That's done more by distillation than chemistry, but that's okay. It only works economically if there's a decent portion of helium, and a decent price being paid for it. There aren't that many rich wells, but with the price going up, more helium will become economic.

(Our planet can do peculiar things with radioactivity. Witness the Oklo natural fission reactor. For those fond of breathing, almost 1% of the atmosphere is made up of argon, which was produced by the radioactive decay of potassium-40. Yes, the same potassium we need for our nerves to operate. Often found in bananas, which are very slightly radioactive. Eat up!)

Some days I just can't resist an info-dump.