Around a hundred people expressed their concern and anger in Rouen on Sunday the day after the announcement of the indefinite postponement of the reopening of a school due to asbestos discovered on the floors after the fire a week ago two disused buildings.
The Pépinières school group will remain closed “until further notice” after the results of a new series of analyzes which revealed that asbestos was present on the ground, both inside and outside the buildings of the school group, announced the town hall on Saturday evening. In total, the closure concerns 15 classes and 350 students who will be educated in other establishments including the Rosa Parks school, a few hundred meters away from that of the Pépinières. “There is going to be a new campaign (of measures) in the Pépinières school and in the surrounding neighborhood. We have to check,” promises the mayor. The elected official ensured that he applied “the precautionary principle”.
“I was pregnant at the time of the Lubrizol fire (an accident in a chemical factory in Rouen in 2019, Editor’s note). I left Rouen for several months. Today my son is four years old. Would you put him in Rosa Parks School if he were your child, Mr. Mayor? », asked a young mother, very moved and in tears, during a public meeting. This was organized by the town hall after the fire, followed by the collapse on the night of September 30 to October 1 of two uninhabited buildings dating from the 1970s. “Rosa Parks, yes. Nurseries, no,” replied the mayor, Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol.
Other residents of the neighborhood are worried about the contamination of their homes. “People had to be evacuated. There is asbestos in the school. So, there are also some in the housing,” exclaimed an angry woman. “There will be measurement campaigns in Rouen Habitat housing near the scene of the fire,” Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol tried to reassure, warning that the removal of debris will take “several weeks at least.”
“I understand the anger of the residents,” comments Gérald Le Corre, head of the CGT of Seine-Maritime and member of the Lubrizol collective, to AFP. He recalls that a single asbestos fiber “can produce mesothelioma (cancer caused by asbestos, editor’s note) in 30 or 40 years”.
