Airport terminal cracks further

PARIS - Cracking noises and new fissures in an airport terminal at Charles de Gaulle International Airport on Monday interrupted the search for survivors in a section of the building that collapsed early Sunday.

An airport spokesman said it was not clear when work at the building would resume, though search dogs did not indicate the presence of additional bodies.

The cracking sounds forced the evacuation of the terminal. More than 30 people in airport offices and a nearby restaurant were evacuated, airport director Rene Brun said. Airport staff will not be allowed back inside until an investigation is completed, Brun said.

The police have revised the number of people killed in the accident to four, saying that earlier reports of an additional death were based on body parts that belonged to one victim. They have yet to identify the dead other than to say that they include a Chinese man, a Czech woman and a man of African origin. They said three were injured.

With more cracks discovered in Terminal 2E on Monday, airport officials suggested that much of the $900-million structure may have to come down, forcing the airport to shift as many as 25,000 passengers a day to other terminals for months, if not years, to come.

While it was too early to say whether a design flaw, engineering error or construction mistake caused the collapse, architects and engineers asked whether the fashion for increasingly innovative buildings has strained the limits of what a group of specialized construction companies can safely build together.

Critics warn that the increasingly extreme designs rely on complex engineering that creates many opportunities for critical errors in implementation. About 400 contractors were involved in the construction of Terminal 2E.

"When architects are more or less captivated by forms that do not come out of the engineering imagination there's always a danger," said David P. Billington, a engineering professor at Princeton and an expert on thin-shell design such as that used in the crumpled terminal.

Award-winning designer Paul Andreu is chief architect for the airport agency and has overseen the growth of Charles de Gaulle airport during the past 30 years. Andreu said Monday that he would return to Paris from China, where he has been working on the national theater in Beijing. He is expected in Paris today. He declined to speculate on the cause of the collapse. Agence France Press news agency quoted him as saying that his design for Terminal 2E was "audacious," but that the materials used were "in no way revolutionary."

- Information from the New York Times, Associated Press and Los Angeles Times was used in this report.

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