Fire safety inspections hadn’t been carried out for several years at the bar where a fire that broke out at a New Year’s party left 40 people dead and over 100 injured, local authorities said Tuesday.
Investigators have said they believe festive sparkling candles atop Champagne bottles ignited the fire at Le Constellation in the resort town of Crans-Montana when they came too close to the ceiling.
Authorities are looking into whether soundproofing material on the ceiling conformed with regulations and whether the candles were permitted for use in the bar.
Swiss authorities have opened a criminal investigation into the bar managers. The two are suspected of involuntary homicide, involuntary bodily harm and involuntarily causing a fire, according to the Valais region’s chief prosecutor.
Regional authorities have said that safety inspections were the responsibility of the municipality. On Tuesday, the head of Crans-Montana’s municipal government, Nicolas Féraud, said that there had been inspections of Le Constellation up to 2019.
People gather around a makeshift memorial to pay their respects by laying flowers, candles and messages near Le Constellation bar Sunday.Maxime Schmid / AFP via Getty Images
But he told a news conference the local council discovered after consulting documents after the fire that “periodic checks were not carried out between 2020 and 2025.”
“We regret this bitterly,” he said, adding that it will be up to judicial authorities to determine what influence that may have had on the chain of events that led to the fire.
Féraud said he couldn’t immediately explain why safety inspections hadn’t been conducted for such a long time.
He said that, in September last year, an external expert had been asked to carry out a soundproofing analysis and had concluded that the bar complied with anti-noise rules, without making further remarks.
Police officers carry a coffin with the body of one of six Italians at the military airport in Sion, Switzerland, on Monday, following a devastating fire in a bar in Crans-Montana during New Year’s celebrations.Antonio Calanni / AP
The severity of burns made it difficult to identify some victims of the fire that broke out at about 1:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day, requiring families to supply authorities with DNA samples.
Investigators finished identifying the 40 dead on Sunday and said on Monday that they had identified all 116 people who were injured.
