Hundreds of Visitors forced to Evacuate from Versailles Palace
On June 11, 2024, a fire broke out on part of the roof under construction at the Palace of Versailles, prompting the evacuation of several hundred visitors.
An image taken from a video shared online shows smoke rising from the roof of one of the palace’s wings.
The fire was first detected at 3:13 p.m. in the Marble Courtyard, in an area under renovation. Tourists were quickly evacuated, and fortunately, no injuries or damage to the palace’s vast collections were reported.
Firefighters contained the blaze at a very early stage, requiring only minimal intervention to extinguish it.
Dating back to the 17th century, the Palace of Versailles is one of the most iconic and visited monuments in France.
Almost 100 fire-fighters were mobilized and teams remained on site to prevent any further outbreak of fire in the attic, added the same source.
No one was injured and there was no damage to the collections, the press office told.
The Château de Versailles, the third most visited site in France behind Disneyland Paris and the Louvre Museum, welcomed 8.1 million visitors in 2023. Notably, a substantial 77% of these visitors were foreign. This diverse visitor base highlights the importance of multilingual evacuation planning and management in case of emergencies, as safety managers must be prepared to handle a variety of languages.
This incident, which appears to have left the landmark unscathed, was caused by one of the most frequent in historic buildings: the renovation works in the roof, which is one of the most challenging locations to extinguish fires, as the Notre Dame 2019 fire has shown.
