PARIS – An electric delivery boat pushed up the Seine, past old palaces and opulent museums and under low stone and metal bridges before turning into the Eiffel Tower and gliding to the waterfront.
The captain, Arnaud Montand, was following the planned route for the opening ceremony of next summer’s Olympic Games, and on the last stretch of the route, was the route for Olympic swimmers.
An important part of Paris’ victory was not organizing events only on the river but notably, IN It.
“What a beautiful window that overlooks Paris,” Montand said as he got behind the wheel inside his cozy glass cabin, where he was protected from the pouring rain. “But if there’s a storm, it’s all shut down.”
For years, workers across Paris have been working on what is known as the Swimming Plan — an engineer’s dream, involving thousands of new underground pipes, tanks and pumps designed to prevent harmful bacteria from flowing into the Seine, especially during storms. If successful, the plan would provide a river clean enough for Olympic athletes and later citizens to swim in.
“Do we have a 100% guarantee? The answer is no,” said Pierre Rabadan, deputy mayor in charge of the city’s Olympic plans, including cleaning up the Seine in time for two long-distance races and triathlons. “If it rains continuously for a week before the race, we know the water quality — even with all the work done — probably won’t be at an excellent level.”
But Rabadan also said there are no alternative plans: If the races must be postponed, the organizers will just wait a few days, check the water quality and try again.
Liquid landmark
Considered by many to be the most romantic river in the world, the Seine also smells foul, murky and — after big Saturday nights — covered in the filthy scum of partygoers. During heavy rainstorms, 40 windows scattered on the stone-paved riverbank were flooded with sewage.
That’s why many Parisians – some even working on the official Swim Plan – are awestruck by the idea of diving into the river.
“Have you seen the Seine?” Michael Rodrigues spoke from deep in a hole in the sidewalk, where he was connecting a new pipe to a house so it would no longer leak sewage into the river. “I’m not in the mood.”
That is not always the case. During the first Olympic Games hosted by Paris in 1900, seven swimming events were held in the river. Even after swimming in it was banned in 1923, a year before the Olympics returned to the city, locals continued to dive into the Pont d’Iéna on hot summer days, the Eiffel Tower jutting out. behind them as they cool down in the water.
But the river is increasingly polluted by sewage and industrial waste. A study in the 1990s classified the stretch of road that runs through Paris as one of the places with the highest levels of heavy metals in the world, according to a study. history of the river.
Jacques Chirac, the former mayor of Paris and later president of France, promised to return to those swimming days, in 1990 he vowed that for three years, “I would swim in the Seine in front of the public. proof that the Seine is a clean river. River.”
That never happened.
“Those are just nice words,” said Jean-Marie Mouchel, a hydrologist and professor at the Sorbonne University who has studied the Seine for three decades. While there have been many improvements in river water quality, especially through the modernization of wastewater treatment plants, “there are no plans for swimming in the Seine before 2020,” he said. .
The Olympics changed that — not only by advancing the plan, but also by inspiring a budget of 1.4 billion euros (over $1.53 billion) to make it happen.
A legacy of the Olympics, the city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, has promised, to allow locals access to about 20 swimming areas along the Seine and its upper tributary, the Marne, in season summer 2025.
“The Olympics are just one tool to accelerate the transition and improve water quality,” said Rabadan, adding that the plan has brought together more than two dozen government agencies, water utilities, and more. and sanitation, as well as river and port authorities. “likely there will be no commit.”
Pipeline and persuasion
The aim of every agency concerned is to make the water clean enough that the levels of two indicator bacteria — E. coli and enterococci — are below the standards set forth by European Bathing Directive. The Olympic standards allow for slightly higher levels, approved by a committee.
Teams in France have been testing the Seine water regularly since 2020. Last summer, about half of their samples met the target. But those were occupied over a long stretch of the river and its tributaries for three summer months.
As workers checked the progress of the planned Olympic events — the swimming part of the triathlon and the two 10 km events for men and women — for two weeks at the end of summer, when the Games will take place, the result being 90% “fair,” meaning an Olympic committee will have to decide whether or not to continue.
Rabadan and other city employees see it as promising, as much of the Swim Plan remains unfulfilled.
“We are not cleaning up the Seine,” said Samuel Colin-Canivez, the city’s chief engineer in charge of wastewater projects, as he led the tour down a newly built tunnel that stretches below the river. “Our approach is to prevent untreated water from entering the Seine.”
The 700 meter long tunnel connects to a huge underground storage tank under construction between the Austerlitz train station and a 350 years old hospital. Between them, they will have space to hold 13.2 million gallons – enough water to fill 20 Olympic swimming pools.
The tunnel and cistern are among five major engineering projects under construction to deal with the storms, which are now flooding Paris’ ancient sewer system, and more importantly, to collect both sewage and water. rain. When those tunnels are flooded with rainwater, they discharge everything — rainwater, sinks, and toilet water — into the Seine.
“Right now, that happens 12 times a year when it rains heavily on the east side of the city,” Colin-Canivez said as he strolled around the partially built tank. Once completed, the massive reservoir will hold that water during storms and then slowly return it to the drainage system after the rain stops. “Our goal with this is to reduce that number to two.”
It’s a rainy weather strategy to keep sewage out of the Seine. The dry weather strategy involves a host of other projects. Some are simple, such as adding special treatment methods to two upstream wastewater treatment plants. Bigger factory, Seine-Valenton, which absorbs the sewage of 2.5 million people, six miles southwest of Paris. Once a small amount of performic acid is introduced into the discharge in June, the level of harmful bacteria in the feces is reduced by a hundredfold, said Vincent Rocher, innovation director for the Greater Paris Sanitation Authority.
Others are smaller and more personal, such as door-to-door teams in six suburbs of Paris, trying to convince more than 20,000 homeowners to allow workers to dig their pipes and get them back on track. away from the drainage system. That’s how many homes are said to discharge their sewage into the Seine or the Marne.
“House by house,” said Claire Costel, project leader in the southeastern region of Paris. “There’s no other way to do it.”
Here, there are two separate underground tunnel systems: one dedicated to wastewater and one dedicated to rainwater. However, in many cases, builders have connected sewage pipes to storm water systems. Elsewhere, like on the small island of Fanac, houses are built to dump sewage directly into the Marne.
The only way to find out which homes have poor connections, Costel says, is to check their pipes. Her team then tries to convince the landlord to allow them to fix the error.
Although teams can offer a 6,000-euro grant that usually covers renovation costs, many homeowners refuse. By March of last year, only about 5,000 people had accepted, according to a city report.
“It was delicate,” Costel explained. “We can’t force them to open the door.”
Her team had the most success: They built a new drainage pipe and pumping system for 40 homes on Fanac.
The attraction for many residents, on Fanac and neighboring towns, is the Olympic heritage.
“I learned to swim as a child in the Marne,” said Jean-Louis Bourgeois, 70, as he stood outside his brick house in Le Perreux-sur-Marne one morning after workers worked to perfect your drainage system. “I would be happy to swim there again.”
Surface tension
Inside the city limits of Paris, the target was not workers’ homes but boats. About 170 aircraft are moored along the banks of the Seine upstream of the Olympic venues. Until recently, almost all of them dumped wastewater directly into rivers.
In 2018, the city announced that all boats should be connected to the city’s sewage system, and the port authority began the process of installing a costly sewage pump and connection system at the site. Ports do not have this system. Aquatic residents are given two years to install a coupled wastewater collection system on their boats.
So far, only about half have completed the job, according to city employees.
Many boat owners have complained that they are being unfairly targeted. Unlike their neighbors on the ground, they don’t have a choice, and retrofitting old boats can cost up to 25,000 euros – five times what the government offers as subsidies.
“Do you think the boat parking 30 kilometers from Paris will be connected to a wastewater treatment system?” Hervé Lavollée, who lived on a retrofitted 1937 barge moored near a pedestrian bridge in central Paris. “They make a lot of noise about all this for the 8 p.m. news so it looks like they’re doing a lot, but that’s ridiculous.”
Nicolas Londinsky, director of water and wastewater systems in Paris, admits that pollution caused by boats is relatively small, but says it can make the difference between passing a water quality test at nearby swimming area and failed the test. “If we really want to improve water quality, we have to do everything,” he said.
And despite his criticism, Lavollée says he likes the idea of swimming in the Seine. Every night, as he brushed his teeth in the bathroom on the boat, he looked out at the river sparkling in the city lights.
He was constantly amazed by its beauty.
“If we have a chance to show the world what the Seine is, and give this perspective of Paris,” he said, “that would be a great idea.”
