A SURVIVING employee of the Swiss ski resort bar where a deadly fire killed 40 says she is “haunted by the faces of the dead”.
French national Louise Leguistin, 25, was one of the only staff members of Le Constellation to escape unharmed after the horrific blaze tore through the downstairs nightspot in the early hours of New Year’s Day.
She told police she had started working at the popular venue in Crans-Montana on December 11 and had received no safety training, as reported by French broadcaster BFM TV.
The majority of the victims burnt to death after becoming trapped on a narrow staircase that had been reduced in size by the owners, Jacques and Jessica Moretti.
Jacques is currently in custody and faces a range of charges including manslaughter by negligence.
“Since the events, I have had great difficulty sleeping,” Louise said in a interview with investigators.
“I constantly see the faces of the dead, of people I served, whom I recognized outside, burned. The smell remains in my nose.”
Louise recalled the horror when she made it to a bar across the street which was harbouring survivors.
“There were burn victims everywhere, and the smell… it was horrific. There are mirrors everywhere and people could see their reflections,” she said.
Louise described how a group of big spenders had reserved about a dozen bottles that night and requested they all be brought to the table at once around 1.10am.
“Jessica sent me to the office to get costumes to prepare for sending the bottles,” she said.
As part of the luxury service experience, the bottles were delivered by a choreographed parade, with music, sparklers and costumes.
“I think there were seven or eight of us in that column of bottles,” she explained.
The night had been very quiet to begin with, with hardly anyone in at midnight to celebrate the New Year, according to police statements obtained by BFMTV.
Venue co-owner Jessica Moretti had told another waitress, Cyane Panine, 24, they needed “to liven things up”.
Cyane led the procession of champagne bottles in a motorcycle helmet and jumped onto a male waiter’s shoulders, “as she had done before, notably a week earlier,” says Louise.
“Everyone is in disguise. Cyane has a helmet on her head, Mathieu has a mask too. Perhaps their field of vision… At that moment, I didn’t know the fire had started. I saw it later in videos,” Louise said.
“In these videos, you can clearly see that the fire started as soon as we left with the bottles. We lost between 30 and 35 seconds.
“With the music playing, people weren’t shouting ‘fire’. We had our backs turned and we couldn’t see the fire. We carried on.
“There were burn victims everywhere, and the smell… it was horrific. There are mirrors everywhere and people could see their reflections
Louise, surviving employee of Le Constellation
“I wondered if I had time to go behind the bar to get a bucket of water, but it was too late, everything had already caught.”
She said she didn’t know if there was a fire extinguisher upstairs or downstairs, and mistook the service door for an emergency exit.
“I wondered if I had time to go behind the bar to get a bucket of water, but it was too late, everything had already caught,” she said.
Louise also said she never was given instructions on how to use the sparkler candles.
It was revealed last week that Cyane died in the blaze, suffocating after being trapped behind a locked service door.
Jacques told investigators that he found a pile of bodies on the floor when he unlocked the door after the deadly blaze, one of which was waitress Cyane.
He said: “Her boyfriend and I tried to resuscitate her outside on the street for more than an hour until the paramedics told us it was too late.”
Jacques said he only found out the door she was trapped behind was “locked from the inside and on a latch” after the fire.
The disgraced bar will spend at least the next three months in prison after he was deemed a flight risk, before a trial in March.
Jessica is alleged to have driven home as quickly as possible after the fire, taking the till full of cash with her.
She is also under investigation.
Investigators have now established that 34 of the 40 victims died on the single staircase leading up from the basement.
