Big fear in a hairdressing salon in Argenteuil.
On Monday shortly before 5 p.m., the floor of the Ethnika Barber Shop, at 39, rue Carême-Prenant, collapsed.
“We were working, there were clients.
The ground suddenly fell like that, ”recounts Daniel, the store manager.
A video shot at that time in the store shows four people totally dumbfounded to see themselves like this one meter below ground level.
They fell into a cellar of the building.
None of them were injured.
Its could happen that in Argenteuil its ptddddrrrr pic.twitter.com/kHjlorZo7J
- III ⵣ (@ Hamidou92k) November 29, 2021
The firefighters arrived a few minutes later.
They hired a dog team and another to make sure no one was buried.
They inspected the building.
Due to doubts about the solidity of the building, its occupants had to evacuate the premises.
The hall of the building would have been hit.
Six people occupying the apartments above the shops had to be relocated.
The manager of the hairdressing salon and his employee were placed on technical unemployment.
He also had to close the nail shop located at the foot of the same building, which he also manages.
"Everything is sagging here"
In the neighborhood, this collapse impressed everyone but without really surprising. “Everything is sagging here. All the neighbors have problems, ”says Nadia, a shop employee. "It is the whole street that should be put under arrest of imminent danger", adds Slimane, a trader. They point out the irregularities of the ground in several courtyards of the street building. At number 38, the building would have been evacuated. There would only be one occupied apartment left. "It collapsed here last year," said Slimane, pointing to the road at the corner of rue Paul-Vaillant-Couturier.
The facades of the street have cracks.
Slimane shows the courtyard of the building at 37, rue Carême-Prenant.
"Look at the pipe, we can see that it will collapse," he laments.
According to the town hall, the firefighters examined the buildings around the shop where the collapse took place.
They noted variations in the ground level for that of 33, rue Paul-Vaillant-Couturier.
A safety order should be taken by the town hall, as for the building at 37, rue Carême-Prenant.
For the latter, the municipality recommended to the owner to bring in a design office to define the work to be carried out to secure the building.
She specifies that the presence of the cellar in which the floor of the hairdressing salon collapsed was not known to her services.
Gypsum basements
The reason for this collapse is not yet known but it could be related to the composition of the soil in the city center. The presence of gypsum has been known for a long time and has been exploited for several centuries to provide plaster throughout the Paris Basin. Nowadays, this results in the formation of fontis, when the gypsum dissolves in water. This happened last May, in rue Gérard-Philipe, in the Coteaux district. A leak in an underground pipeline caused the formation of a 15 m deep hole. The town hall realized this by noting a subsidence of the roadway.
Sometimes this type of event occurs under buildings.
This is what happened at 8, rue Léopold-Gautherin.
Residents noticed a hole in the ground of their parking lot a few months ago.
They had known about the presence of gypsum in the ground for a long time.
The walls had started to crack in 1995, just after its construction.
Micropiles had to be installed this year to strengthen the foundations.