Bastien Ohier – Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty Images
On Saturday, Parisians and tourists were able to swim in France for the first time in over a century in France. The river has been closed to swimmers since 1923 when it was classified as too dirty to swim safely.
Although the city has spoken about the clean -up work of the Seine since the 1990s, the real thrust came in 2015 when Paris made the offer for the organization of the 2024 Olympic Games. In this nine -year period, there was enough progress that open swimming races were held in the waterway. Even the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, got involved last summer to prove that the river was clean enough to organize competitions.
Dmitry Kostyukov – The New York Times/Redux
Dmitry Kostyukov – The New York Times/Redux
Bastien Ohier – Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty Images
To ensure that the River was Olympic, Paris invested $ 1.5 billion in the cleanup, which is referred to as the “swimming plan”. As a result, more than 20,000 houses So far, this has been that waste water was integrated into the SEIN in the sewage system, which significantly reduces the pollution that penetrates into the river.
However, the all-clear is not indefinite: city officials will continue to monitor the bacterial values daily to determine whether the river can swim safely and the green and red flags will mark whether swimmers can take a bath. On Sunday, just one day after the large reopening of the river, The flags were red After the precipitation of this day, the bacterial levels brought it to an unsafe point. Heavy rains can overwhelm the newly built cisterns, which can absorb up to 13 million gallons wastewater that would otherwise go directly into their own.
On the days on which a green flag is wearing, the three swimming locations enable around 1,000 visitors a day by the end of August.
Julien de Rosa – AFP/Getty Images
Thomas Padilla – Photo
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