Despite being highly regarded in art, literature, music, and a constant favorite haunt of lovers, Seine anything but environmental decoration for the City of Light.

The famous river that flows through the French capital has been dying a slow death for decades due to widespread pollution of its waters.

The city’s outdated sewer system mixes sewage with rainwater. However, in the event of heavy rainfall and an overload of the system, this mixture of millions of cubic meters of polluted water enters the Seine through dozens of storm pipes.

Swimming in the Seine has been banned, with rare exceptions, since 1923. At the same time, its waters are so toxic that few species of fish remain in them. Essentially, the usefulness of a river is limited only by its function as a waterway for transporting people and goods, and as a “grave” for various useless items.

However, now, due to 2024 Olympicsits muddy brown-green waters have a chance to be “reborn”.

The complex and costly project to clean up the Seine is expected to restore the river ecosystem, so that the famous but (for now) forbidden river will find its role not only for visitors to the Olympics, but for all time. And on a planet with ever-rising temperatures to be a breath of fresh air for locals and foreigners alike, making the French capital livable in increasingly frequent heatwaves.

“It will cause, so to speak, a tsunami in the world, because many cities are looking at Paris. This is the start of a movement. At least that’s what we hope…” says Dan Angelescu, a scientist who monitors the water quality in the Seine by taking regular samples.

The Olympic deadline actually hastened the cleanup project, which had been stalled in planning for decades.
The need to have supplies for 10,500 Olympic athletes and then 4,400 Paralympians will significantly accelerate a €1.4 billion process that the city says will take many years to complete.

But in addition to hosting open swimming competitions, the Seine will be the theater for the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games, which for the first time will take place not in a stadium, but along the water emblem of the city and its banks.

Program

More than half a billion euros is being allocated for huge storage tanks and other public works that will reduce the discharge of untreated, bacteria-laden sewage into the river when it rains.

In addition, a reservoir with a capacity of 20 Olympic-size pools is being built next to the Austerlitz railway station, where polluted water will flow and be treated, rather than being dumped untreated into the Seine through storm drains.

According to the municipality, water quality has already improved and the fish have bred compared to the two or three species that were able to survive in the inhospitable aquatic environment of past decades.

Source: Associated Press/Bloomberg.