PARIS, France — Firefighters declared success Tuesday morning in an over 12-hour battle to extinguish an inferno engulfing Paris' iconic Notre Dame cathedral that claimed its spire and roof, but spared its bell towers.
Here are some of the top tweets and photos Tuesday from reporters and photographers both outside and inside the church:
Reaction is pouring in from around the world with tributes to the structure.
We're also getting our first look at some of the damage both inside and outside post-fire. While the extent of the damage is still being surveyed, at this point it appears firefighters managed to save much of the structure.
What remained was a blackened shell of the monument immortalized in Victor Hugo's 1831 novel "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," a building that had survived almost 900 years of tumultuous French history but was devastated amid renovation works at the start of Catholic Easter week.
Its iconic twin bell towers remained visibly intact. Paris officials said the world famous 18th century organ that boasts 8,000 pipes also appeared to have survived, along with other treasures inside the cathedral, after a plan to safeguard heritage was quickly put into action.
At dawn, the twin 69-meter towers swarmed with building specialists and architects, looking tiny from the ground as they conducted analysis.
"The entire fire is out," declared Paris firefighters' spokesman Gabriel Plus, adding that workers were currently "surveying the movement of structures and extinguishing smoldering residues."
Officials consider the fire an accident, possibly as a result of the restoration work taking place at the global architectural treasure, but that news has done nothing to ease the national mourning.
The 12th-century church is home to relics, stained glass and other works of art of incalculable value, and is a leading tourist attraction. Its organ dates to the 1730s and was constructed by Francois Thierry.
"The organ is a very fragile instrument, especially its pipes. It has not burnt, but no one can tell whether it has been damaged by water. Nobody knows if it is a functioning state or will need to be restored," Bertrand de Feydeau, a senior French heritage preservation official, told the AP.
Paris Deputy Mayor Emmanuel Gregoire described authorities' "enormous relief" at the salvaging of pieces such as the purported Crown of Christ, which were quickly transported to a "secret location" by officials after the fire.
Religious statues that were removed last week from the cathedral roof as part of a restoration of the monumental Paris church's towering spire were also spared.
The 3-meter-tall copper figures, which looked over the city from Notre Dame's 96-meter-high peak, were sent to southwestern France for work that is part of a 6 million-euro ($6.8 million) renovation project on the cathedral spire and its 250 tons of lead.
On Thursday, the public got a first ground-level look at the statues, representing the 12 apostles and four evangelists, when a huge crane lowered them onto a truck.
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The Associated Press contributed to this report