Notre Dame Official Says 'Computer Glitch' Could Be Fire Culprit (cbsnews.com) 173
A "computer glitch" may have been behind the fast-spreading fire that ravaged Notre Dame, Associated Press reported Friday, citing the cathedral's rector. From the report: Speaking during a meeting of local business owners, rector Patrick Chauvet did not elaborate on the exact nature of the glitch, adding that "we may find out what happened in two or three months." On Thursday, Paris police investigators said they think an electrical short-circuit most likely caused the fire. French newspaper Le Parisien has reported that a fire alarm went off at Notre Dame shortly after 6 p.m. Monday but a computer bug showed the fire's location in the wrong place. The paper reported the flames may have started at the bottom of the cathedral's giant spire and may have been caused by an electrical problem in an elevator. Chauvet said there were fire alarms throughout the building, which he described as "well protected."
Sure blame the computers (Score:4, Insightful)
It wasn't a "computer bug" but a human bug and evidently the result of inadequate testing of the system.
Nice try at scapegoating.
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Hey man, don't blame the messenger. The fire wasn't the fire alarm's fault.
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LOL a couple of weeks of ago I was listening to the Lord of The Cello in Palm Springs and between songs, he said just that... Don't kick the robots because robots remember well.
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And, investigation may show that it wasn't "computer" issue - i.e. hardware or software (including configuration files) - at all but the result of an electrician mislabeling and/or mis-routing wiring.
Yep, during testing after install and modifications of alarm systems, every sensor should be triggered and it should be confirmed that the input registers at the right place and as the correct sensor on the alarm panels/computer displays.
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don't they have address dips for each unit on each ring bus?
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Yes, typically in the baseplate (so someone can replace the detector and you don't have to worry about someone messing with switches. Hopefully they'll leave them alone, and hopefully they're hidden under a cover.)
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every sensor should be triggered
Reminds me of the time when I and a few colleagues "Inherited" an un-labeled electrical installation back in the 1980s. We spent a few weeks walking around the building and crating short-circuits on purpose, to see which fuse got triggered.
Uhhh, no. (Score:5, Informative)
Computers are listed as why the fire might not have been found quickly. Even the summary shown here states that the fire was likely caused by the elevator wiring.
Joseph Elwell.
Re:Uhhh, no. (Score:5, Funny)
Computers are listed as why the fire might not have been found quickly. Even the summary shown here states that the fire was likely caused by the elevator wiring.
Joseph Elwell.
Well, to be fair, electrical wiring of elevators was probably well beyond the ability of the typical laborer in medieval France.
It's amazing it lasted this long.
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What a stupid post, of course they didn't have elevators when it was built. Those weren't installed until the 19th century, when they removed the giant escalator.
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(read AC's 2nd sentence)
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The woosher becomes the wooshed.
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Computers are listed as why the fire might not have been found quickly. Even the summary shown here states that the fire was likely caused by the elevator wiring. Joseph Elwell.
Technically, from a certain perspective the summary is correct. It's just leaving out a whole lot of necessary information, but the summary as written could mean that the computer bug, which showed the fire in the wrong place, made it worse, not that it caused the fire. I wouldn't write it that way, but the submitter could mean "culprit" in a way that we don't, meaning not the root cause but a contributing factor. Remember, we live in an age where in English people just put a ? at the end of every sen
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Yeah, this is bad clickbait wording. The fire maybe would not have gotten so out of control because of this, but it already existed by the time the comptuer glitch got involved.
Bad title (Score:5, Insightful)
Should have been "Computer glitch may have delayed firefighters' response to Notre Dame fire"
Perhaps amount of child porn overloaded servers (Score:2)
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This is Notre Dame, not British Parliament or a red state daycare.
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The church had porn LONG before either of those other things existed. Newbs.
Obviously (Score:1)
Someone used a GOTO.
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Someone used a GOTO.
Now that is funny!
Fire suppression system (Score:5, Insightful)
And now billion euros, millions of work hours, thousands of tons of materials, etc. would be spent to repair the damage. Would not it be cheaper to istall the fire suppression system?
Money for repairs proves taxes too low (Score:2, Troll)
Now the yellow-vests have tons of money and prestigious jobs to fight over instead of fighting the government.
Wrong, wrong, wrong ... the fact that people have surplus cash to donate to repairs is viewed by the yellow jackets that taxation is too low. They will now fight the government to increase taxation to collect this surplus so that it can be spent on "social programs".
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Got your political flavors reversed buddy. It's the petrol tax hike that lit this riot, not insufficient taxation. Repeating a word is like pounding on a table: a strong signal to everybody that you do not know a damn thing.
Nope. Its actually that you are an uninformed idiot. It was widely reported that yellow jackets are pissed off about donations to Notre Dame and are citing that as taxes being too low. Seems you are not qualified to comment on how much a person knows.
"And they felt even more outraged when, in just a few hours, billionaires pledged hundreds of millions of dollars (euros) to help restore the damaged cathedral while their demands remain unsatisfied in their longstanding fight with the French government.
It had a fire suppression system, stone (Score:3)
I'm not sure about Notre Dame but some medieval vaulted ceilings are built with drainage for roof leaks and roof fire fighting (via bucket brigades).
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The building was not designed for protection against electrical fires, because there was no electricity then. At the time the spire was built there was no possibility for a fire to start in that place without someone being there with a burning lamp/torch/whatever.
I wasn't referring to electical fires specifically, but in medieval days electrical fires were a concern. Lightning. And being the tallest building around made lightning a practical concern, something they did in fact consider. There were specific prayers to spare the church from lightning strikes.
A spire makes no sense from an architectural POW, it has no functional role except to impress people. And it makes no sense because the basic spire structure is the same as a chimney, except with wooden parts. So any fire here will get out of control very fast (that's why the alarm location error was so critical).
The spire might have been an addition, possibly one that occurred after the invention of lighting rods. I'm not suggesting that was the motivation, I'd go with the "impress people" idea. Cathedrals seemed to be re
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Fire protection systems are generally not designed to protect the building. They are designed to protect human life, sacrificing the building to let people get out safely. Mostly they work by compartmentalizing the fire and extracting the smoke.
Fire suppression would have been difficult to retrofit and probably caused more damage than it would have prevented. If you have a building full of valuable artefacts you probably don't want to be flooding it with water, for example. Especially if you have many of th
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Not true at all, there are a huge number of methods and systems to protect the most tricky and at risk structures, no matter how complex, it can most definitely be protected. The failure was either gross negligence or criminal conspiracy. Blaming it on a computer which could have been altered post attack, very disturbing and it seems very much like they are jumping from excuse to excuse. Choose and perish, gross negligence or criminal conspiracy, Macron burned down the Note Dame, do not let Macron burn down
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You say there are a huge number of methods... Don't care to mention a single one, presumable because you know that if you do I'll tear it down, and then go off on a rant about Macron and Yellow Vests.
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I do not get it, - a massive dry wood construction, which s called a "forest" and no fire suppression system
Maybe people want Notre-Dame to be as authentic as possible, without further modern construction/installatiopns?
Re:Fire suppression system (Score:4, Interesting)
I do not get it, - a massive dry wood construction, which s called a "forest" and no fire suppression system.
No you don't get it. There was a suppression system. There was also an alert system. The the later (as the subject of this story says) was configured incorrectly. The former never works how you may imagine in an old building. These suppression systems are designed for normal buildings with normal room heights and normal construction and are almost impossible to retrofit in any way that maintains the performance one would expect in a new building. In addition fire control is a fundamental part of design which often works in tandem with suppression systems to increase their effectiveness. It's not like you can put a firedoor down the middle of a cathedral.
In addition to that you're making a lot of assumptions. The Notre Dame was going through major renovations. It is typical that fire systems are disabled, modified, or even rendered ineffective (there was a forest of scaffolding inside the building) during major renovations.
Fire suppression is not simply gluing a round smoke detector to your ceiling and calling it a day.
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About the only thing that would have allowed protection without an insane cost and significant risk of water damage would be a water misting system (HiFog). That has only been viable in the past 10-20 years, and is not a common approach for this type of construction. I don’t know how effective it could be in the spire though, due to its intricacy and exposed external surfaces.
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This is what happens when there is poorly defined property rights: Tragedy of the Commons.
Does the Catholic church not own the cathedral?
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"Does the Catholic church not own the cathedral?"
Nope, owned by the french government.
Personally, I blame Macron.
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It's probably because of the French Revolution, when Church property was confiscated by the government. Marx defined socialism after all of this happened.
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Does the Catholic church not own the cathedral?
Church properties were seized during the french revolution, with the rationale that they had been built using people's taxes and hence should be owned by the people.
They own it, but they don't pay for it (Score:3)
This has become a pretty major bone of contention on the left and in the atheist community. The Catholic Church is probably the single wealthiest organization on Earth and there will be a small fortune diverted to fixing up a cathedral for the well to do and connected to worship a god of the poor and do
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I'd be interested to see what the per capita for the value of the wealth of the Church v the number of active* Catholics in the world. If you came up with a value of that for an organization that includes hundreds of millions of active worshipers, and the value of a Church organization probably doesn't look to out of sorts v a mega church or ordinary non-denominational or denominational church of any other variety.
*I know the total number of living baptised members is over a billion, but that includes everb
My question is, (Score:1)
if there is a God, why would He let his biggest house of worship burn during Holy Week?
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Because He places less importance on the size of "houses of worship" than we do? That would be my guess, if I had to hazard one....
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Because He places less importance on the size of "houses of worship" than we do? That would be my guess, if I had to hazard one....
Clearly he's pissed at Trump.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Kings_(statue) [wikipedia.org]
Of course they rebuilt it. This church is simply a tax shelter for rich people..
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If I were religious, I might think god was providing a gentle reminder that he thinks the first or second (depending on who you are) commandment is a wee bit more important than the general recommendations and best practices in Leviticus.
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if there is a God, why would He let his biggest house of worship burn during Holy Week?
Why would he let Joseph be sold into slavery by his brothers, then later put in prison for a crime he was falsely accused of?
Sometimes we don't know the reasons until much later, if ever.
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"The income of the priest class is totally dependent on their continued ability to sell invisible goods to suckers, they praise and glorify faith to the skies, complimenting people on how much of it they have. If it weren't for faith, they'd be out of business, and they know it."
Sure, it's computer problem. It bad programming (Score:1)
In modern fire systems, even in the early 1990's, the panel will tell you the ID or zone of the sensor that is causing the alarm. When you get the wrong initial location, it is because the zone was not setup properly, then any subsequent computerization was then programmed with wrong information. (Source: I managed data centers and fire control systems, including a problematic and "ancient" fire panel from 1994).
No it wasn't (Score:4, Insightful)
As others have pointed out, they're looking at elevator wiring as the actual cause of the fire. The wrong location given for the alarm would be a contributing factor to delays in fighting the fire.
Even there, I doubt it was a 'computer glitch'. It's more likely an installer glitch, as in connecting the wrong signal wires to the wrong terminal or configuring the computer with the wrong location information for the terminals. Followed by not manually testing each alarm and making sure the correct location was displayed.
That seems pedantic (Score:2)
they're looking at elevator wiring as the actual cause of the fire
Which technically true the "glitch" was not the root cause, since it's what enabled the fire to actually become uncontainable, I would say designating the glitch as the cause of the fire in the main is not unreasonable.
I also can't believe they didn't test the system often t catch wrong locations of alarms!
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Even without the alarm screw-up, there would still have been a fire. They might or might not have been able to limit the damage significantly had the alarm indicated the correct location.
Halt and catch fire (Score:2)
that is all.
Hard & harsh reality... (Score:3)
The church had become a money pit for over 20 years where the repairs and repair funding was not keeping up with the deterioration.
This way demolition was quick, shell is relatively intact, 12 apostles removed from roof 4 days prior and 1B euro raised in 24 hrs. during pre-easter weekend and added benefit of yellow vest protest nature change. Rebuild will be better and with advanced anti-fire systems. And just maybe they can figure out how to keep the shell outer stonework from falling off.
ESR predicted it a long time ago (Score:2)
The patch hack of Notre Dame (Score:2)
A software fix properly applied would have correctly identified the location of the fire, but it might not have helped put it out in time. A church of that importance with a wood-beamed roof should have had fire suppression equipment in place (not "sprinklers" but more like a Halon system, to avoid damage to the antiquities below) and cameras feeding to a continuously monitored onsite security room where a human could make decisions about what systems to trigger.
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You couldn’t use a clean agent system for a space that large— you would need compartmentalization for it to be effective. Water mist might have been possible, but still very expensive.
Or it could be that someone just set it on fire (Score:4, Insightful)
Or it could be that someone just set it on fire. I don't know why everyone is discounting this possibility. Too horrible to contemplate? Even Snopes (which exists mostly to support fake news), concedes: "February 2019 saw a series of acts of vandalism in French churches that prompted widespread concern and that one website said constituted the worst month for anti-Christian acts since 2015." Why is it such a stretch that someone just went in there, poured some gasoline and threw a match? Afraid of what you'll find, eh, Macron?
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I assume they will be looking a video footage of people going in and out of the church and around it to account for the possibility of arson.
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Or it could be that someone just set it on fire
There was Nobody where the fire started.
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It only seems people are discounting this possibility - because unlike clueless right wing bigots like yourself (who've already decided on the cause), we're looking at evidence and weighing the facts.
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You're responding to a left-wing bigot. Don't waste the time.
Not likely (Score:2)
Computers? (Score:2)
That was not a computer.
Its legal investigation as to why the fire started. Who, why, when, where, what with.
Computers don't always start fires.
agriculture (Score:1)
+ human error (Score:1)
Re: /. won't report UBlock/Adblock security issues (Score:2, Insightful)
Create an account. Then submit it as a story. Until you do that, you have no grounds to complain about Slashdot's story selection. You are just looking for an excuse to spam stories with off-topic nonsense, which you've been doing for days now. You're obsessed with spamming Slashdot and carrying out some vendetta against whipslash, otherwise you'd have created an account and submitted this story like a normal person would. I don't think the editors do a good job, but that doesn't justify your continued spam
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more like a MS_Windows virus or malware, or an MS_Windows update went horribly wrong
No, in fact, the Windows update worked well, taking the normal 23 minutes...
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After closing? Another troll lie, there were lots of people in the building worshiping.
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You mean 'ordinateur'.
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And over here in the real world, no: https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... [snopes.com]
It's more like 875 churches and most of the incidents include graffiti, French authorities link this to "a rise in anti-Catholic sentiment in the country" since it's mostly Catholic churches that are targeted and not Christian as such.