Update: Notre Dame Cathedral investigation – Part 2
Bottom Line: So, our current best explanation for the fire at Notre Dame being an accident was a worker’s cigarette butt setting it off. All workers are to be off the job site at 5:30. The initial fire alarm didn’t register until 6:21 and wasn’t detected until just before 6:51. Anyone see potential flies in the ointment of that explanation? So, if it’s this type of explanation one of two things had to have happened. 1. A worker stayed well beyond the time they were supposed to be onsite, which would be an issue unto itself and there were no reports of this being case (this is why no one was injured or onsite when the fire broke out from the crew), and accidentally started the fire with a cigarette butt 2. The cigarette butt caused a small smoldering fire that took over 50 minutes to register and well over an hour to detect. This is probably the best non-conspiratorial explanation at this point. But even then, there’s still something that’d need to be reconciled... The origin of the fire being at the base of the Spire – where no equipment and no work was being conducted that day.
Add this against the backdrop of ISIS immediately calling on churches being attacked around the world. Might seem opportunistic but then again if they put out that call and warning ahead of time might there have been more protection for a facility like Notre Dame during Holy Week? Additionally, we know ISIS was behind the coordination of the Sri Lanka attacks. Attacks that we know now had been coordinated by dozens of people for at least several weeks in advance of the attacks – well in advance of the fire at Notre Dame. We also know that over 1,000 churches and/or monuments had been attacked over the prior year in France alone (with Islamic terror markers most commonly being left behind), including a church burned in Paris by terrorists less than three weeks before the fire at Notre Dame. All of that could just be a coincidence. It really could. But it would have to be. I’ll continue to go where the facts take me.
Btw, in the meantime, in Bethlehem Pennsylvania, a church was burned yesterday. It was ruled to be arson.