what to remember from the hearings of the RATP and the SNCF – Liberation

In their turn. After the ministers Gérald Darmanin and Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, the prefect Didier Lallement, the officials of the French Football Federation (FFF) and the mayor of Liverpool, several big pundits of the RATP and the SNCF also had to submit to questions members of the culture and law committees of the Senate, this Tuesday, on the occasion of a new hearing devoted to the fiasco of crowd management near the Stade de France. Here are the main lessons to be learned.

SNCF not warned of the congestion of supporters

On the evening of the final, RER B traffic was affected by a strike by RATP agents. Many supporters therefore turned to line D. And the filtering devices on arrival at the stadium were overwhelmed by this influx of spectators, a large part of whom would have presented themselves without tickets or with counterfeit tickets.

Thereupon, the SNCF certifies on Tuesday that it has not received “no alert on the theme “there are problems, we are no longer absorbing, so hold the RER D”, as explained by Sylvie Charles, director of Transilien (the branch of the SNCF in charge of trains in the Paris suburbs). However, it recalled that its services transmitted every half hour to the organizers the number of supporters counted at the exit of the two RER stations serving the stadium, on lines B and D.

The incomplete accounts of travelers

In detail, the RATP has 36,000 people who have taken line 13 from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. that evening – this figure was 27,000 in the slide show of the Ministry of the Interior ten days earlier – while the SNCF points on its side to 37,000 people, “more than three times what we usually have” on the RER D, and 6,200, “a third of what we usually have”, on the RER B. This last total does not therefore take into account the 10,500 passengers on the southern portion of the RER B stopping at Gare du Nord, identified and mentioned by Gérald Darmanin during his hearing: a way of inflating the figures in order to maintain the initial version of an unexpected influx that was impossible for the authorities in charge of security to contain. There is nothing to confirm that these people all got off at the Gare du Nord station to take a train from the northern portion, towards the Stade de France.

The margin of error concerning this type of count is around 5%, conceded Philippe Martin, deputy general manager in charge of transport and maintenance operations at RATP. Christophe Fanichet, CEO of SNCF Voyages, specifies that “the counts were carried out manually by agents”.

The FFF was informed of the transfer of travelers to the RER D

It was one of the most anticipated points: Philippe Martin said to himself “a little surprised at the statements of the French Football Federation” about an alleged lack of information and communication from the RATP. During a previous hearing in the Senate, on June 9, the director of institutional affairs, Erwan Le Prévost, said: “If we had had real-time information on the diversion of flows from RER B to RER D, we could have redesigned our system at the start of the afternoon. The prefecture did not have the information either.

However this Tuesday, Philippe Martin pointed out that a meeting with the authorities and the organizers, on May 24, “had clearly specified the transport plan (and) clearly indicated that we were going to transfer part of the flows from line B to line D”. “There was an AFP dispatch on May 26 which clearly indicates that the RATP invites travelers to use line D as a priority”he adds, while noting that a new “point position” had been made with the French Football Federation on May 27, the day before the match. On the other hand, the same Philippe Martin specifies that the management of flows between the RER D and the pre-filtering points has not been raised “at [sa] knowledge” during the preparatory interviews in which he took part.

No major notable incidents near the stations

The representatives of the RATP and the SNCF underlined in the preamble that their competence stops at the gates of their stations. And both said there had been no major incidents in their area despite the high attendance. “Our officers observed jets of projectiles, bottles and the like, on the west ramp. […] They found very pissed off Liverpool supporters, particularly drunk […] But nothing serious. There are always events at the Stade de France. They also noted the strong presence of pickpockets on the docks., says Sylvie Charles, the boss of the Transilien. Statements in contradiction with the elements cited in the report of the prefect Michel Cadot, which reports acts of delinquency against the staff of Ile-de-France Mobilités.

CCTV images requested too late

Asked about the video surveillance images recorded on their networks on the evening of May 28, the representatives of the two carriers recall that usually, “the images of the stations and the immediate surroundings are kept for 72 hours for storage reasons. We are requisitioned 7,000 times a year for images”explains Jérôme Harnois, the director in charge of risk management, security issues and institutional affairs.

If the SNCF destroyed the videos taken on board the trains, it however kept most of the images in the station. The head of the security PC asked that their destruction be interrupted because of the two incidents reported in the stations of Saint-Denis (a fight and the start of a stampede at La Plaine Saint-Denis), confirms Sylvie Charles, director of Transilien. “In this specific case, as we had an incident at Saint-Denis station, rail security blocked them for up to 30 days. Afterwards, on Friday June 1, the railway security received a call from the territorial transport brigade asking it to block the images. A part had begun to be erased in the Saint-Denis plain but not all. We received requisitions on June 2”she says.

For the rest of the images, however, the requisitions were only made to the courts on Friday June 10, the day after the hearings of the prefect Lallement and the FFF. Far too late, then. Jérôme Harnois insists: “There were no objective reasons to keep these images” since there was no “no notable incident on our rights-of-way”.