While undergoing renovation and restoration, the roof of Notre-Dame caught fire on the evening of 15 April 2019.

"It is believed that before the arrival of Christianity in France, a Gallo-Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter stood on the site of Notre-Dame. Evidence for this is the Pillar of the Boatmen, discovered in 1710."

"The Pillar of the Boatmen (French: Pilier des nautes) is a monumental Roman column erected in Lutetia (modern Paris) in honour of Jupiter by the guild of boatmen in the 1st century AD.

 It is the oldest monument in Paris and is one of the earliest pieces of representational Gallo-Roman art to carry a written inscription"

"The guild was for relatively wealthy shipowners or traders. An indication of the power of the guild is shown by one of the sculptures of the pillar where they parade in arms with shields and spears, a privilege granted by the Romans, which is exceptional in less than half a century after the conquest of Gaul.

 The guild was also the first known society of Paris."


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillar_of_the_Boatmen

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notre-Dame_de_Paris



"forest" of wooden latticework inside Notre Dame Cathedral fueled the fire that consumed the iconic church.

The medieval roof structure "has been lost," according to Monsignor Patrick Chauvet, the rector of the cathedral.

The cathedral's wooden frame, which primarily consisted of oak, contains beams that date as far back as the first frame built for the cathedral. That frame featured trees cut down between 1160 and 1170, forming one of the oldest parts of the structure."


https://www.cnn.com/style/article/nortre-dame-fire-oak-wood-trnd/index.html


To kick off the project, workers cleared 21 hectares of oak. Each beam of the intricate wooden cross-work was drawn from a different tree: estimated at 13,000 trees in total.

 To reach the heights the carpenters needed to build the structure, those trees would likely have been 300 or 400 years old, meaning they would have sprouted out of the ground in the eighth or ninth centuries.

The wood frame structure supported a roof, made of lead, that weighed 210 tons. 

The lead frame had the advantage of being fire-resistant, according to the National Library of France. But the wood that supported that lead roof is what burned."


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"Officials in other historic European capitals such as Rome and London, as well as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization also have no such outdoor lead-dust hazard guidelines."

"Some media outlets reported that registered levels of lead contamination in locations surrounding the fire-damaged cathedral ranged between 500 and 800 times the official safe levels.

But health officials told the AP that Paris still does not have any official regulatory threshold.


The World Health Organization said it also has no outdoor safety guidelines for lead dust and has no “immediate” intention to create any."

Despite the lead fallout from the fire, experts say tourists should not alter travel plans to one of the most visited cities in the world."

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(Sound familiar? Damn the public health. Open the sacred economy.)