Notre Dame visit- 20th and 21st November

Both days of the long awaited and ground breaking Notre Dame trip was attended by a wonderful mix of delegates, hosts and of course our excellent guest speaker, John Armstrong of Sedgewick.

Once we’d assembled at St Pancras, we boarded the Eurostar and much to the unhappiness of other passengers, we proceeded to buy the entire stock of Croissants from the buffet car. We arrived at the venue for a light lunch before John gave us a bit of background of his experience of similar losses. 2001 was a bad year for cathedrals it would seem with both Coventry and Peterborough Cathedrals suffering extensive fires.

Points I took away from the event was that for such an unusual risk such as the Notre Dame and the timescales for repair being in the region of 20 years or so, it’s a real challenge to accurately predict rebuild valuations due to materials and skill costs changing over this period. Few realise that it took over 180 years to build in the first place. In addition, there are concerns over some of the materials used. There was a significant amount of lead pollution for instance and the walls contained arsenic.

All in all a very sobering event and one which probably challenged us all compared to normal day to day things we deal with.