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Comment by soco | Hacker News Reader

They also rely on medieval era trees to reconstruct it, as the more than 1000 oak trees painstakingly sought through entire France had to be more than 1 m wide. Okay not medieval - they are only about 200 years old. Could have made a nice title though.

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There's the story by the Long Now foundation about the oak beams at the New College in Oxford https://longnow.org/ideas/humans-and-trees-in-long-term-part... /// https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oak-beams-new-college-ox... /// https://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2013/oct/02/david-...

Another example (and less debatable in its authenticity) Why the US Navy Manages Its Own Private Forest - https://www.military.com/history/why-us-navy-manages-its-own... /// https://ussconstitutionmuseum.org/2015/05/11/the-wooden-wall... (and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28793461 )

In the 1950s, Lund Cathedral bought the quarries where the stone for it originally came 900 years ago, so they know they have a source of the right stone for renovations.

We have a forest in the center of France that was dedicated to producing ship masts. Surely some of those oak trees may have fit the bill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_of_Tron%C3%A7ais

Between 200 and 400 years old, yes, exactly ! Most of those trees are older than the United States :)

That's really sad. What a shame cutting down 1k large old oaks for any building at all. It's not necessary these days. Of course they need some wood in publicly viewable areas, but this amount of not only wood but large old oak trees is excessive and concerning.

Is there any indication that they're improving the structure so it will be more fire proof? Or are they simply restoring it to the configuration that already failed?

> Or are they simply restoring it to the configuration that already failed?

780 years is not that bad for a building. (or, more precisely, the roof frame)

Macron & co had some idea for new things. They were all horrible. While I do think with good taste one could do some new things nicely ( e.g maybe a titanium-based roof instead of the lead one ), a restoration is the next best choice when proposed new things are crazy ugly/out-of-touch.

Btw, in our age, and since at least the early middle-age in France and old Europe, the use of old, large trees is the main political reason to keep alive some old, large forest with old trees. For ordinary wood they do plantations of fast-growing stuff and cut at maybe 40y or so.

The only electrical fire vector they needed to worry about 780 years ago was lightning storms.

I'm not proposing ugly or out of touch changes. Materials changes like titanium instead of lead are exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. Not all of the oak will be in publicly viewable areas.

I'm surprised and disappointed you don't keep forests around simply to benefit nature and humanity without needing a pretext of building construction.

Titanium is a, extremely expensive, alternative to steel and aluminium when strength and weight are an issue. I literally never heard anyone propose to replace lead with it...

Oak don't grow straight naturally, so all most all tall 1 meter thick oak trees were planted and are crops. If you don't cut some down now and replant there will be no tall 1 mete wide oak trees in 200 years time. Most European forests are cultural landscapes that are actively harvested and renewed.

The cathedral has been up for hundreds of years, hard to qualify that as a failure.

Not exactly in its most recent configuration that failed.

The people in charge are so concerned about historical accuracy they need to cut down a thousand large oaks, but their predecessors weren't so concerned about historical accuracy when they retrofitted a medieval structure with the electrical wiring that ended up causing it to burn down.

Lucky for Notre Dame, HN is not charge of reconstruction...

The wiring that were installed in the oak structure, if they are the cause for a short that ultimately caused the fire, were contrary to regulation in the first place and were only meant to be installed temporarily.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notre-Dame_fire

The cutting down of 1000 year oaks is sad. Perhaps we can have the perspective that these trees lived fulfilling lives and the younger trees deserve centuries?

And after all the Notre Dame is also a very historically significant building

My grand mother [1] has tracked down many of those oaks and produced imprints [2] of their barks as a tribute to the trees and also to the (both public and private) owners of the forests in which the trees have been cut.

At least 1k oaks were harvested from forests everywhere in France. [3] The majority of them were given for free to help in the rebuilding, and trees of this age/dimensions/quality are definitely not cheap. Both the cutting and moving of such trees -- between 6 and 13 meters, up to 15 tons! -- requires careful planning and flawless execution as they need to be taken out of the forests and preserved during their journey to the sawmill [4] in the North of France. (Here is also an interview of the sawmill operators [5].)

Crazy and fascinating project involving several rare craftsmanships.

(Everything is written in French below.)

[1] https://www.onf.fr/onf/+/bcf::constance-fulda-larbre-dans-la... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv38f3m3f2k [3] https://actu.fr/ile-de-france/ferrieres-en-brie_77181/notre-... [4] https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1876802/france-notre-da... [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQtxUsU9T2Y&t=63s

[bonus] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9bardage

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