At least 16 people have been injured, seven of whom remain in a critical condition, after a gas explosion sparked a blaze in buildings in Paris’s Latin Quarter.
The gas explosion happened in the fifth arrondissement of Paris at around 5pm on Wednesday, resulting in several buildings catching fire, local officials said.
Police told people to avoid the Val-de-Grâce area, near the Pantheon and Luxembourg Gardens, after the facade of a building collapsed and the fire appeared to have spread to neighbouring buildings.
Just after 5pm local time, local people described one powerful explosion and a smaller one. One man told France Info public radio: “It was shocking. It’s a disaster.”
Alexandra, a local pharmacist, said: “We heard an incredible, very loud explosion at around 5pm, we felt the force of it. We thought this isn’t a storm, this is serious. We heard the fire services. I went out to see if I could help. But it’s all shut off. There are large numbers of fire services and emergency services. It’s atrocious.”
Some reported a huge plume of smoke rising above the neighbourhood.
The journalist Olivier Galzi, who was nearby at the time of explosion, told BFM TV that he had seen the facade of a nearby building “completely collapse.”
Police, fire services and ambulance services rushed to the scene.
The Paris prosecutor said it was not possible at this stage to determine the cause of the fire.
At around 6.45 local time on Wednesday evening, police said the fire was under control and that the rescue work was continuing.
The blast occurred in the Rue Saint-Jacques in the 5th arrondissement of central Paris. The road leads from the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral to the Sorbonne University and the Val-de-Grâce military hospital and is a few blocks from the popular Jardin du Luxembourg.
The area is usually packed with tourists and foreign students in the early summer.
“I was at home writing … I thought it was a bomb,” the art historian Monique Mosser told Reuters, adding that many of the windows in her building had been blown out by the blast’s shockwave.
“A neighbour knocked on the door and told me that the fire brigade were asking us to evacuate as quickly as possible. I grabbed my laptop, my phone. I didn’t even think to get my medication.”
