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Reliving the Concorde crash
By Kim Willsher Last updated at 00:00am on 02.08.01At 4.43pm on 25 July last year, Michele Fricheteau was standing in the reception of her small hotel, dusting the counter and chatting to a young receptionist. At 4.44pm, 170 tons of aircraft crash-landed. Concorde Air France, flight 4590, bound for New York, had smashed into her home, killing 109 people on board and four of her staff.
Luckily - if it makes any sense to use the word - the 40-room Hotelissimo was almost deserted that Tuesday afternoon as the doomed plane screamed into the air trailing a plume of flames. There was only one guest, 21-year-old Alice Brooking, a British student who had checked in earlier and was waiting in her room for the arrival of the Suffolk Youth Wind Band for which she would be acting as tour guide. Most of the staff had gone home early after finishing their preparations for the arrival of the 50 young British musicians that evening. Half an hour before, Madame Fricheteau had asked her secretary to take her dog to the vet as it had an injured paw.
Two eighteen-year-old Polish students, Ewa Lipinska and Paulina Sypko, working as helpers, were asleep in their room. Only the chambermaids, Kenza Rachid and Devranee Chundunsing, a mother of two young children, were at work.
"For us, it was an unusual day because we were expecting this large group of British schoolchildren and we had a lot of people booked for dinner," recalls Fricheteau.
"I heard a tremendous roar and thought, 'Bloody hell, Concorde is really overdoing it today.' No sooner had I said it, than I was hit by a huge ball of flames in my face. I pushed my little trainee and told him to get out of the window and turned around to go and get the others. At that point everything crashed down in front of me. I realised I couldn't save the others."
As she escaped from the blazing ruins of the building, Fricheteau says she noticed Brooking screaming from what remained of her first-floor bedroom. "I grabbed her legs and begged her to jump. Eventually she did, and we ran away from the building. At that point we didn't understand what had happened.
"We didn't know that Concorde had crashed onto us - we just ran." They reached a neighbouring restaurant where Fricheteau telephoned her husband. She tried to return to the hotel but was intercepted by the emergency services and taken to hospital.
This was a tragedy that shook many lives on many levels. But, as the events unfolded, the destroyed Hotelissimo and its staff were almost forgotten, relegated to bit-part characters in the drama. Today, Fricheteau has set about righting this wrong with a book entitled Putain de Crash (Bloody Crash). This is the untold story of the Concorde disaster.
"Of course, everyone remembers that Concorde crashed and that everyone on board was killed, but many forgot that there were people killed on the ground.
I didn't want us to be forgotten or buried away in some newspaper cutting which described us as a ' fleapit' hotel." At her rented home in the village of Marly-La-Ville, Fricheteau was last week surrounded by her former staff, who had gathered to visit the cemetery where their colleagues were buried. "We are like a big family," she explains in a gravelly voice from years of chain-smoking. "And we support each other like a good family does. It helps us come to terms with what happened.
"We lost everything. The hotel was not just where we worked but was also our home. When it was destroyed we lost all our mementoes, photographs and even the children's school books. Later, the crash investigators showed us what remained of the hotel. It fitted into a two-metre square box." While Fricheteau says her compensation claim with Air France was recently resolved in a "satisfactory deal", she adds: "You can get the right amount of money and be happy with it, but it doesn't give us back everything we had before."
Now that their compensation has been settled, the Fricheteaus plan to open another hotel in New Caledonia on the shores of the French Pacific. Several Hotelissimo staff members have said they will emigrate with them.
She adds: "I am not bitter, I am happy to be alive. There were four other people who were not so fortunate.
"It was an accident and accidents can happen to anyone. But when you know that you can disappear off the face of the earth in a few seconds you look at life differently."
