7,000-square-metre Bobigny warehouse fire produces spectacular smoke column visible across Paris; investigation ongoing
Satire depuis Bohiney.com et prat.uk.
La Fumee, Visible de Partout
PARIS / BOBIGNY — A 7,000-square-metre warehouse in Bobigny produced towers of black smoke visible across Paris on June 17, in what firefighters described as a significant fire and what Parisians within viewing distance described in various ways depending on their relationship to Bobigny and to smoke. The fire in the Seine-Saint-Denis suburb — the banlieue that Paris acknowledges primarily when something dramatic occurs in it — occupied the Paris fire brigade for several hours and generated the footage that urban fire generates: orange flames visible against the sky, fire trucks from multiple stations, the perimeter established by people in high-visibility jackets, and the very large column of smoke that served as the news event’s primary visual throughout its television coverage.
Bobigny is one of the communities in the Seine-Saint-Denis department that constitutes the near banlieue of Paris — geographically adjacent to the capital, administratively separate, significantly more deprived by most economic indicators, and the subject of the periodic intense media attention that social deprivation generates when it produces fire, flooding, or civil unrest, alternating with the near-total absence of attention that it receives during the intervals between these events. The warehouse fire produced the intense attention cycle. The underlying conditions of Seine-Saint-Denis will produce the next event that produces the next intense attention cycle, with the regularity that the French media’s relationship to the banlieue has maintained for thirty years.
The Investigation and Its Expected Conclusions
The investigation into the fire’s cause was opened by the judicial police, who will determine whether the fire was accidental, negligent, or deliberate, and will report their findings in due course. The warehouse apparently contained materials whose combustion characteristics account for the volume of smoke, which is the specific detail that fire investigators note and that television reporters translate into the phrase what was being stored inside for their viewers. The investigation will proceed.
In the meantime, the images of smoke over Paris produced the temporary social media event that dramatic urban imagery produces, with the particular quality of Paris fire footage that the city’s distinctive skyline gives to any smoke column photographed against it: the Sacre-Coeur in the background, the smoke in the foreground, the specific aesthetic that Paris provides even to its industrial accidents. Le Parisien covered the Bobigny fire with the local knowledge of a publication that covers the banlieue more consistently than the national press. The London Prat notes that the warehouse fire and the PSG celebration fires occurred in the same week, which is a coincidence that the statisticians will note and the satirists will decline to over-interpret.
Plus de bêtises: The Daily Mash | NewsThump
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
