FRANCE: At 6.57 a.m. yesterday, passengers in the ultra-modern terminal 2E at Roissy Charles de Gaulle Airport heard a loud cracking sound. Cement dust filled the air and fissures began to open up in the terminal's high, vaulted ceiling. Lara Marlowe in Paris reports
Police had begun evacuating the area when dozens of tonnes of concrete, steel and glass crashed down, killing at least five, possibly six, passengers and injuring three.
The terminal had just received two arrivals, an Air France flight from New York and another from Johannesburg, and a third was about to leave for Prague. Officials said some victims may have been transit passengers waiting for later flights. Their identities were not known last night.
Two hundred and fifty firemen and rescue workers used sniffer dogs, cameras and cranes to search for victims and to begin to clear the debris, which covered a 50-by-30 metre area. French soldiers in camouflage uniform, armed with assault rifles, stood guard beside military vehicles, preventing journalists and onlookers from approaching the devastated terminal.
Passengers who saw the collapsed section of the terminal from aircraft windows assumed it had been bombed, and rumours of a bombing circulated among travellers who were redirected to other terminals or as far away as Orly Airport. But the French Transport Minister, Mr Gilles de Robien, said that "nothing indicates it could be an attack", and cautioned against jumping to conclusions before two investigations were completed.
"It would have been much worse if it had happened at rush hour," Mr Pierre Graff, the president of Aéroports de Paris, said. Because of the early hour of the collapse, "we avoided a far more tragic catastrophe", he said, adding the incident "obviously concerns the structure itself".
Fifty million passengers fly through Roissy airport, just north of Paris, every year. 2E was the newest of six terminals and was to have increased its passenger quota from six million to 10 million by the end of this year, making Roissy the biggest hub in Europe. Air France was the terminal's main user, but its "Skyteam" partners Alitalia, Delta and the Czech, Korean and Mexican carriers also used it.
With its dramatic design - a 650-metre steel, concrete and glass jetty where passengers waited to board aircraft - terminal 2E was considered the pride of French airports. Its architect, Paul Andreu, is currently building the Beijing opera. He refused to comment on the collapse and the deaths it caused.
Terminal 2F, which faces 2E, continued to function normally yesterday despite the fact that it has virtually the same design.
Passengers eyed the ceiling anxiously, watching for cracks.
Terminal 2E was innaugurated on June 25th, 2003. Its opening was delayed twice, the second time on orders from the security commission of the Seine Saint Denis department. A lighting system crashed seven metres to the floor of the terminal while inspectors were visiting the building.
Mr Frédéric Pierret, a member of the commission, said inspectors found that the alarm system was not certified and that telephone links within the terminal were insufficient. "We were never concerned with structural flaws," he added. Jean-Francois, an airport worker interviewed by French television, said: "When it rained hard, we often saw leaks in the ceiling. You wonder about a terminal that is less than a year-old with leaks like that."
"When you build such unusual structures it's very pretty," said Mr Stéphane Deverchin, a representative of the UNSA trade union which helped construct the terminal. "But it's not terribly practical."