The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
In the bowels of a £1.5bn filter ‘cleaning’ the Seine
Peter Allen in Paris
GLISTENING in the early spring sunshine, the most romantic river in the world just about looks clean enough to dive into, but only if you squint a little.
This stretch of the Seine in Paris – by Austerlitz railway station on the French capital’s fabled Left Bank – leads up to Notre-Dame cathedral and all the golden bridges where lovers from all over the world embrace.
Soon the waterway will be even more attractive, officials claim, because there is a James Bond-style cavern directly below my feet that is the whooshing hub of a clean-up operation that will allow swimming for the first time in a hundred years. Not just that, but athletes will actually be racing in the Seine during the Paris 2024 summer Olympics, the government says.
The City of Light is built on impossible myths, but the Austerlitz basin is all about science and – more specifically – an ambitious engineering project costing upwards of £1billion.
It contains a nexus of pipes and pumps linked to a tank measuring 50m (164ft) in diameter and 30m (98ft) in depth. Along with a 700m tunnel, it is capable of holding 13million gallons of bacteria-laden rainwater, before redirecting it away from the river and to a processing plant, technically leaving a clean Seine.
The plan is to reduce the number of times overflowing sewage is released into the river per year from 12 to just two. Emmanuel Macron, the president, is so confident it will all work that he has pledged to don his Speedos to be the first in, before a procession of Seine barges take part in the Olympics opening ceremony on July 26.
This week Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, the sports minister, said: “I have confidence in the ambitious action plan – one that cost €1.3 billion (£1.1 billion) – and which has been going on for three years.”
But there are already plenty of problems threatening the astonishingly expensive project. Environmentalists are still picking up dangerous levels of
E-coli and intestinal enterococci in the water, and pre-Olympic events are regularly being cancelled.
Worst of all, officials involved in Operation Swim, as it is informally dubbed, know that they cannot do anything about nature. It will take just a few summer storms to render the work of the Austerlitz redundant.
“There is no guarantee it will work following excessive amounts of rain,” an official at Paris’s city hall – the Hotel de Ville – told “Yes, there can be a lot of rain in Paris during the summer, and – yes – all the expense and work could be put in jeopardy.”
Race officials have already mooted postponing triathlon events after heavy rainfall. The reason for this can be explained relatively simply – excessive amounts of storm water will overburden the Austerlitz complex, just as it has been leaving Paris’s ancient sewer system unable to cope for decades.
Specifically, one of the biggest engineering projects in the recent history of Paris may not be big enough, despite being able to hold enough water to fill 20 Olympic-size swimming pools.
Such unpredictability is also evident in other aspects of Operation Swim, which extends to four other sites in the suburbs that are trying to regulate the city’s sewers and waterways.
They are areas that have suffered from reckless industrialisation and a notoriously irresponsible populace.
It was not so long ago that mortuaries were tipping dead bodies into the Seine, while revellers still regularly dump all their left-overs, from wine bottles to electronic scooters, into the river.
Locals still object to a lot of the work that is going on, especially when council teams ask if they can dig up their
According to IQAir, which produces an air quality index based on real-time readings from 100 cities internationally, Chiang Mai was among the 10 worst cities for air pollution yesterday, with a score of 122 – anything above 51 is worrying. Earlier in April, the city was top of the index with a score of 267 – worse than megacities such as Delhi, Beijing and Dhaka.
“In Chiang Mai, the haze is seasonal,” Prof Chaicharn Pothirat, a pulmonary consultant and professor of medicine at Chiang Mai University (CMU), recently told “But over the last 20 years, the intensity and duration has become worse and worse.”
The pollution is driven by “burning season”, when farmers use fire to clear land for the next crop cycle, and by the wildfires that erupt in the dry forests.
But there are mounting signs that the city’s population is paying a harsh price. Last week, a study from Chiang Mai University found that rates of lung disease have surged in northern Thailand, from 20.3 per 100,000 people in 2010, to 30.7 in 2019.
These rates are also far higher than the rest of the country – including the bustling capital Bangkok, where the rate stood at 22.6 in 2019.
“In addition, the incidence of lung cancer among young individuals in the northern region surpasses that of other areas,” Chiang Mai University’s Prof pipes. Some 20,000 property owners who currently eject their toilet and kitchen water straight into the Seine, or its tributary, the Marne, have been approached, but many say no.
This is even the case when people are offered grants worth the equivalent of around £5000 for the renovation work.
Samuel Colin-Canivez, who is in charge of sewage projects for city hall, said there was no attempt to “purify the Seine” but to stop untreated water from “being dumped into the river”, as has been happening for too long. Whatever the objective, there was certainly not much confidence shown by Parisians I spoke to on the Seine quay.
Noleene N’owessem, 20, a student, said: “I have to admit, the water doesn’t look very attractive right now, and I can’t see it improving much in the next few months. I certainly won’t be going for a swim.”
Louis Ortega, 63, and owner of one of the famous “bouquiniste” bookstores on the banks of the Seine, was a bit more optimistic, saying he “might have a dip” if everybody else did.
He added: “It’s all a question of how successful the basin is. If the Olympic swimmers all go in, then I imagine lots of other people will follow. If it all goes wrong, then a great deal of money will have been wasted.”
‘I have to admit, the water doesn’t look very attractive right now. I certainly won’t be going for a swim.’
Chalerm Liewsisakul told the Bangkok Post. “This correlation is likely attributed to PM2.5 pollution.”
Reports of respiratory conditions are also surging in the city’s hospitals, he said. In response, the city plans to expand access to clean air rooms – which have already been set up to protect children in some schools and nurseries.
“As a daily practitioner, I can see that health is deteriorating – especially in the last few years,” said Prof Pothirat. “Most people cannot afford to relocate at this time of year, but I tell my patients who are foreigners or have relatives in the south to leave to protect themselves.”