Impressions of Paris Fire

The International Herald Tribune is displaying on its web site a slide-show on the Paris Fires that hit a block of apartments inhabited by immigrants on August 30th.

From IHT.com:

For the second time in four days, flames tore through a dilapidated building housing African immigrants in Paris, this time killing seven people and sharpening a debate about the living conditions of tens of thousands of the city's poorest residents.
The latest blaze, on Monday night, brings the combined death toll of three such fires since April to 48, including 28 children.
The images of Africans fleeing the flames of their homes have become a powerful illustration of three related challenges facing many Western countries: Immigration is rising, economic inequality is widening and housing prices continue climbing.
About 40 West Africans, most of them from Ivory Coast and many of them illegal immigrants, had been squatters since 1999 in the five-story building that burned. It stood in the Marais district near some of the city's most sought-after addresses.
There were no fire extinguishers nor any running water to wet towels against the smoke.
The fire probably broke out on the second-floor landing of the wooden stairwell around 10 p.m. and took three hours to contain, emergency officials said Tuesday. The flames raced up the stairwell, trapping several inhabitants in the upper stories.
Two men saved their lives by jumping out of windows, suffering serious injuries. One mother, who was later found dead with her three-year-old child, pushed her six-year-old son out of a fourth-floor window. The child died two hours later in a hospital.
The scorched bodies of a family of four, living on the top floor, were found in the debris after the interior of the building collapsed. The mother had been pregnant with twins.
On Tuesday morning, a smell of charred wood lingered in the air outside the building's blackened facade.
Amid wailing women mourning the deaths of friends and family, Bafeteke Dosso, 32, stood shaking his head in disbelief at his neighbors' sudden deaths - and his own survival. Dosso said he lived next to the family that died and survived only because he worked a night shift.
"My neighbor called me at 10:15 p.m. last night when I was at work," he said. "He told me there was a fire and that people were jumping out of the window like on Sept. 11," referring to victims of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.
City officials said a short-circuit resulting from makeshift electrical wiring might have been the cause, although they added it was too early to rule out arson or other causes. Arson or an accident is suspected in another deadly fire last Friday, after officials ruled out structural causes, such as bad elecrical wiring.
According to Yves Contassot, deputy mayor of Paris for the environment, the tale of the burned building speaks for many others. Now owned by the city, the house previously belonged to an unidentified person living outside Paris, Contassot said. It stood empty starting in 1990 and became increasingly rundown.
After the squatters arrived in 1999, city officials, conscious of the safety risks, demanded that the owner repair those parts of the buildings deemed unstable and secure the hazardous electrical wiring. They also asked the water company to restore running water, but to no avail. Instead, the inhabitants fetched water in buckets from a nearby fountain on the street.
When the city threatened to requisition the building in 2001, the owner demanded what Contassot called an exorbitant price. A three-year legal battle ensued, finally resulting in a transaction last year.
"This is not just about immigrants, it's about a worrying trend of speculation in the real estate market and about growing inequality in society," Contassot said.
"Paris has never had more vacant buildings, but the poor don't have access to them."
He said that almost 140,000 housing units are vacant in the city today and that about 72,000 units are second homes of people with their main residence elsewhere in France or abroad.
According to a report by the Abbé Pierre Foundation of Housing for the Underprivileged published this year, the prices of older houses and apartments have doubled over the past five years while those for newer housing rose by 78 percent.
Meanwhile, said Patrick Doutreligne, director of the foundation, the French are only 24 percent richer, so housing is becoming proportionally more and more expensive.
In the greater Paris region, some 300,000 people are waiting to be allocated government-subsidized housing. In central Paris alone, more than 100,000 applications currently compete for 12,000 subsidized apartments.
While their requests are pending, families often end up living in overcrowded and unsafe conditions. In 2002, City Hall declared 1,036 buildings in Paris unsafe and is in the process of renovating them.
Last Friday, a fire killed 17 in a building housing 130, mainly Malian, immigrants with demands for social housing pending for as many as 14 years. On April 15, a blaze in a budget hotel, where the government had put up immigrants waiting for their papers, killed 24.
On Tuesday politicians scrambled to express their concern about France's housing situation and offer solutions.
"There is a very serious problem with unsafe buildings in Paris," Mayor Bertrand Delanoë said on Tuesday. "We want to attack this problem."
President Jacques Chirac expressed his "horror" at the tragedy and said the government would announce a range of measures on Thursday.
Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy ordered all illegally occupied buildings in Paris closed, without indicating where the squatters would be housed.
But if rising immigration and soaring prices have intensified the issue in recent years, the twin problem of scarce social housing and unsafe provisional lodging is not new.
In 1986, three fires in budget hotels housing immigrants killed 18.
"How many more people have to die until the authorities act?" asked Amina Sidibe of the High Council of Malians in France on Tuesday.
"This problem has been around for decades."