DALLAS (1080 KRLD) - A couple from Plano was sitting inside Notre Dame when the fire started Monday night.
Lynne and Glen Middleton were waiting for Mass to start when the evacuation order came.
Lynne Middleton says the choir was singing when someone came on the loud speaker, telling everyone to leave.
"It was a mad dash for everybody to get out," she says. "We got out of the church, and I was worried maybe it was a bomb or something. We didn't know what was going on."
Lynne Middleton says everyone walked for about ten minutes. When they reached a restaurant, someone in the crowd turned around and saw what was happening.
"Somebody said, 'Oh my gosh, Notre Dame's on fire,'" she says. "It was awful. We were all crying and devastated from this. It's just so sad."
"It was a huge fireball. It was the largest fireball I'd ever seen," her husband, Glen Middleton, says. "You can't even describe it, how large it was. The whole thing just went up in flames."
Glen Middleton says people were already returning to the cathedral Tuesday, taking pictures of the damage.
"It's a mob," he says. "You can just see the whole structure's there, but everything that was up in the top is gone. That all fell down; the spire fell down."