Sure, smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, low birth rates, strokes, and arthritis. But smoking didn’t cause the April 15 fire at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, at least according to construction workers who smoked on the site.
A spokesman for a scaffolding firm doing work on the cathedral told reporters last week that while his workers “sometimes” smoked on the oak roof of the building, cigarettes were not the cause of the conflagration.
“We condemn it. But the fire started inside the building... so for company Le Bras this is not a hypothesis, it was not a cigarette butt that set Notre-Dame de Paris on fire,” Le Bras Frères spokesman Marc Eskenazi told Reuters on April 24.
