A 120-foot section of a new terminal at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport collapsed early Sunday, killing at least six people, injuring three and burying an unknown number of others. From IHT
Rescue workers converged on the site to search for survivors of the accident, which appeared to be caused by a structural failure rather than a bomb. Search dogs indicated there were few, if any, people still under the wreckage, said Michel Sapin, prefect of the Seine-Saint-Denis region where the airport is located just north of Paris.
The terminal, a concrete and glass elliptical tube lined with wooden laths, was opened less than a year ago after several construction delays. One section collapsed at about 7 a.m. Sunday, shearing cleanly along the seams with adjoining sections, as Air France flights were disembarking from New York and Johannesburg, South Africa.
"We tried at the last minute to create a security perimeter, since we had noticed cracks," said a spokesman for the airport's crisis center. At least 60 flights were delayed as a result of the accident. The terminal is primarily used by Air France and its SkyTeam partners, including AeroMexico, Alitalia, CSA Czech Airlines, Delta and Korean Air.
The $900 million terminal currently handles six million passengers a year and was expected to handle 10 million by the end of this year as part of French plans to turn Paris into Europe's primary air-travel hub, ahead of London and Frankfurt.
It was built using new technology in order to accommodate the Parisian airport authority's requirement that the 2,100-foot long, 110-foot wide terminal not have any intermediate, interior supports that would restrict the flow of passengers to and from the gates.
To solve the problem, the project's chief architect, Paul Andreu, proposed using technology developed for the construction of tunnels. It was "a significant first, not without numerous difficulties, not least being the open air construction of the concrete shells," noted a 2002 press release from the French Technology Press Bureau.
The concrete shell, built by the French construction firms Eiffel and Laubeuf, was constructed in rings "with three interlocking elements, positioned one next to the other," the press release said. To simulate the pressure on an underground tunnel that keeps the concrete tube intact, the press release explained, steel reinforcement was built outside the shell, which was further reinforced with carbon fiber glued onto the inside.
The shell, its ceiling honeycombed with square windows, was expected to settle as much as 8 centimeters, according to the press release. It said France's Building Science and Testing Center performed a technical assessment of the structure.
The opening of the terminal on June 25 last year was delayed by a week after an overhead light came crashing down just moments before a building inspection. France's leading trade union, the CGT, complained at the time that Air France and the airport authority had rushed construction in order to open the terminal on schedule.
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