Marseille, France’s second largest city, is experiencing hours of fear since an explosion brought down a building in the city center early Sunday morning. The rescue workers found six dead under the rubble this Monday. At least two other people who lived at 17 Tivoli Street still show no signs of life. “There is hope,” Mayor Benoît Payan had declared, “and as long as there is hope of finding survivors, we will not stop” before the last bodies were found.
The causes of the explosion are unknown, Marseille prosecutor Dominique Laurens reported on Sunday. The four-storey, five-apartment building was occupied by elderly people and a couple in their thirties. There were no minors. The extreme difficulty of the salvage between hard-to-reach debris and a still-active blast fire has prolonged uncertainty about the missing.
The collapse of rue Tivoli 17 left Marseille with bad memories. On November 5, 2018, two buildings collapsed in Rue de Aubagne. Eight people died. This episode sparked debate about the terrible state of many buildings in the center of the Mediterranean city. “It was a trauma, it marked a before and after,” commented veteran sociologist Michel Peraldi some time later in Marseille. “It showed the pretty dire state of downtown and the poverty. And the negligence of the city administration, the negligence”.
Mayor Payan has insisted that the collapse of rue Tivoli 17 this Sunday has nothing to do with the collapse of rue d’Aubagne five years ago. In the present case, the buildings were in good condition. The explosion damaged the two neighboring buildings and a few hours later one of them, house number 15 on the same street, collapsed. About 200 people were evacuated.
The development of Marseille – a city of 850,000 people and a major Mediterranean port that lives in a permanent sense of decline compared to the strength of other cities like Bordeaux or Lyon – has become one of the priorities of his presidency for Macron. In September 2021, he visited the city for three days, accompanied by several ministers, and announced a rain of millions for the renovation of a third of the schools and run-down houses and, among other things, the construction of a new police headquarters.
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Despite the city’s social and cultural dynamism, news of the insecurity surrounding Marseille often makes headlines in the rest of France. On the night of April 2-3, less than a week before the Tivoli Street blast, three young men were killed and 12 injured in separate shootings allegedly linked to drug trafficking. One of the dead was 16 years old. So far this year, 13 people have been killed in gangland grudge settlers. In the whole of 2022, 33 died.
General view of the rest of the building, this Monday in Marseille FRANCK PENNANT (EL PAÍS)
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