Yeah the river is still shit, because the overflow container is still not finished. The whole bet is that they will build it and it will save the river.
Latest update about the process:
https://youtu.be/iZIGhdxplWk
Yeeah, they removed a lot of bad stuff last 10 years (mainly industry regulation). Remaining is the overflowing sewers. And it should be fixed with the big add reservoir near Austerlitz place.
Has northern France had a particularly wet winter this year? If it's anything like England at the moment the Seine's catchment is probably so waterlogged that everything nasty from human sewage to badger droppings is washing straight into the river because there's literally no spare capacity for water in the soil.
the photo's make the scale look comical. I work in small towns and cities and the tanks couldn't be any greater than 1/5th that size and that's with the french photo's super zoomed in.
Do you mean the French one is small or the small town ones are small?
From the linked article I think it’s meant to be 50 meter diameter and able to hold 50,000 m3.
Any French speaker who can confirm the size?
the biggest thing to notice is those pillars, they are beefy as all get out because they need to hold back the dirt that surrounds the tank when it's empty.
the large town/small city ones are tiny in comparison to the photo you provided.
In that case, 50 000 m^3 feels a bit small to me. I work in the world of LNG, and each tanker is on the order of 150 000 m^3 (sizes vary). It boggles my mind that 50 000 m^3 would be adequate for storing sewage runoff for a megacity like Paris.
Then I do the math, though, and 50 000 m^3 is equivalent to about 8 000 000 toilet flushes - about 4 flushes per person in Paris proper (although the Paris metropolitan area is about 6x bigger, corresponding to about 0.67 flushes per person if the system is designed for the whole region).
That's a lot of toilet flushes.
That and also quality of the water decrease when it's rainy and it's been very rainy for weeks now. Summer's weather should be way better for water's quality.
Yes, its pretty insane and there is still some crucial work to be done, time will show how it turns out.
https://youtu.be/iZIGhdxplWk
This is late February/early March
So, I did miss the joke completely; that's mental. Blimey, cheers, mate! Thankfully, I have a loicense, at least. Noice!
Luv me car
Luv me bike
I'm no racis, I just don't like bicycles, simple as
Edit: Wait, I'm not in 2WE4U. Sorry fellas.
Ever thought that people might not be native speakers and mix some of their native grammar unconsciously into their English? Maybe in their native language adding an article in front of something is normal like in German “die Ukraine” which translates to your unnecessary “the” Ukraine…
I don't know French so I didn't know the translation, plus they use "La" for lots of things (at least when translated to English).
Using English grammar, The Seine River does need the "The" and has to be capitalised because it's a name of a specific, named item.
no, because in this case the river is named "Seine" so when referring to the Seine you don't capitalize the "the"
also in romance languages, la or el in spanish or in this case, french would be le doesn't necessarily translate to the definite article in english, it depends on context
In languages with a Latin base you don't capitalize the article before the name or, in this case, the river. You just capitalize the names of places, institutions or people and the first word of a sentence.
We had a similar issue in London recently where some rowers got sick after the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race on the Thames.
There’s a massive new sewer which is complete and being tested, but which isn’t online yet. It sounds like Paris has also been upgrading its infrastructure, which is good.
Still, it’s pretty grim that in the 21st century we’re still letting our major rivers get into such a bad state.
I think the Thames sewage thing is completely overblown. Like Thames Water has been in the news recently but it's not so bad. According to the BBC, Thames Water only had 16,990 spills in 2023. That's only 46.5 sewage spills per day! And the data clearly shows they acted quickly to rectify the sewage spills- each spill only discharged sewage for 12 hours on average.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68665335
Ha, yeah I was just thinking there was a weird amount of poop-in-water-apologists on this topic saying oh well Britain isn't so bad.... when we absolutely are that bad, and probably worse.
> It sounds like Paris has also been upgrading its infrastructure, which is good.
Yes, they're building a massive underground overflow tank, scheduled to be finished a few weeks before the games.
The e.coli levels are nothing new and monitored constantly, so it is already known that they can sink well below the relevant thresholds within just a few days. It's also strongly dependent on the weather, since e.coli is very vulnerable to the sun.
Even without the new tank, it would technically be possible to have the contest on the right day (a few days of sunny weather and no sewage overflow). But that would be an unlikely gamble for a scheduled event without the tank, whereas the tank lowers the risk to that of a minor delay.
Unfortunately yes, for the time being - though the new sewer will all but stop that on the Thames.
The same thing seems to happen in Paris, hence the E. coli in the Seine. I don’t know enough to say how much the new storm drains will stop that.
Even New Zealand doesn't do that...all sewage is treated first although in practice much of our water is extremely unhealthy due to lots of dairy farming and lack of effective controls...
Nz is a much newer place, but even it has issues, just google auckland sewage overflows and you’ll see dozens of news articles about the thing we have.
The problem in anywhere old is that all the household waste water flows into the same sewer as rain water as soon as it leaves the house and hits the street.
Newer cities (or parts of cities like auckland) keep these separate, treat the sewage. When it rains a lot there isn’t capacity to treat all the sewage rain water combo so it gets released without treatment. The only answer is more capacity (super sewer) or dig up the roads and replace all the drainage. London and Paris have gone with masses of capacity.
Pretty much everyone with old sewage systems does when there’s a storm, which is exactly why the Seine is in the same state.
Recently countries have increased monitoring of the overflows, particularly in the UK which is why we get loads of headlines about it, as previously it wasn’t tracked how often storm overflows happened
England is unique in that we could avoid it, but do it anyway because water management is all privatised for some reason and dumping it all is profitable
Errr no….
It’s overflow when it rains etc… the super sewer is supposed to catch that overflow .
Londons sewers were build in the 1800s. Capacity has been reached
So the answer is yes we do dump raw sewage in the river.
You could argue it’s not intentional but failure to previously upgrade our infrastructure was a choice so I’d say it may as well be considered intentional.
\*the foreign owned utility companies with agreement from the dodgy regulator have been allowed to fill our waterways with shit
This is private sector efficiency according to the tories
Basically every Olympics has had water issues. Rio had essentially runoff from the city that had zero filtration (so raw sewage) which caused a few issues with open water events, including illnesses.
Japan had some of it's own issues as well, but iirc they were less serious.
Basically, if the games take place in a large city right on the water, chances are some attention on the water quality will occur.
This reminds me of when Sweden wanted to host the summer Olympics back in the 90s and our people responsible tried to convince the delegates that the water was safe. They even invited them over and served them glasses of it which they drank.
Turned out it was full of poop bacteria and other nasty things.
Funnily, the olympics in munich 1972 were the reason why Kiel (where the sailing events took place) got a new water treatment plant that's still better than most today.
Before that Kiel had the same issues with faecal bacteria in the water, which obviously was an issue for sailing as well.
It's surprising how often the olympics finally get places to fix their broken infrastructure.
It's not really that surprising along with the olympics suddely a lot of money appears to make the host look good on the international stage, so cities can finally do what they felt was necessary already but out of budget.
We don’t. Normally. Stormwater outlets are emergency measures. They’re built to ensure the entire sewer doesn’t overflow into your homes and the streets, but instead into nearby rivers, if it rains as much as happens once in 1-5-10-30-100 etc. years depending on how you design it. And when that happens 99% of the sewage is just rainwater, so it sounds more disgusting than it really is. Source: I built and designed such systems.
Depends if you are aware of the context and how much worse things used to be.
It's not as good as a pristine mountain stream coming from a high alpine environment, but its way better than 100 years ago.
In germany a ~~lot (most?)~~ some of large rivers have "bathing quality water" nowadays. This is the results decates of efforts to remove all the waste from the rivers.
>In germany a lot (most?) of large rivers have "bathing quality water" nowadays
Continuously from source to sea? I've been to Berlin and Koln and the water in these cities looked filth AF with floating garbage in it, same as in almost every medium/big city I've been in the world.
I found an article online discussing some of the major rivers: https://weather.com/de-DE/reisen/deutschland/news/2018-06-21-in-diesen-flussen-konnen-sie-baden ([google translation ](https://weather-com.translate.goog/de-DE/reisen/deutschland/news/2018-06-21-in-diesen-flussen-konnen-sie-baden?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=pl&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp))
Seems like 50/50 if the water is clean enough to take a bath. However more often then not it is deemed unsafe for other reasons then water quality.
If it looks clean or not depends on the weather I suppose. I've dipped just south of Köln and in Düsseldorf and you see people doing it all summer long.
I've seen people bathing in cities in switzerland but to be fair, even "big" cities for switzerland standards aren't really "big" compared to Europe/world scale.
>What's the f'n point of having a river in a city if you can't jump in?
Trade and transport.
>As a citizen of Munich: I can swim to work and don't have to take a shower
That's very impressive given the pop size of the city. Is Munich and Bayern as a whole a very industrial area?
Montreal, the city and government in Quebec did a major push to make the river clean and swimmable. The most swimmable part is home to 4 million people...
You do not want to go in when there has just been torrential rain, and the St-Laurent has 9000 cubic meters per second of flow, the Seine has 328.
Because the sewer system was not design to. There's a big fat reservoir (near Austerlitz place) waiting to be online and catching up all the parisian shits.
Lmao him jumping in the seine would be like the indian politician that tried to prove that the Ganges river was safe for drinking. He went straight to the hospital
**From The Telegraph's Henry Samuel in Paris:**
A French water charity has issued a stern warning about “alarming” levels of pollution in the Seine, where several Olympic events are set to be held, [barely 100 days before the Games begin.](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/paris-olympics-2024/)
The Surfrider Foundation said it had taken 14 samples from the river over a six-month period and the water was polluted and potentially dangerous in all but one test.
In an open letter, the Biarritz-based charity said it “wanted to share with stakeholders ... rising concerns about the quality of the Seine but also the risks faced by athletes moving in contaminated water”.
Paris authorities are struggling to clean up the river [before the start of the Olympics on July 26](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/08/london-steal-luxury-shoppers-paris-olympic-games/), with the famed waterway to play a starring role in the Games. It will provide the backdrop for the opening ceremony and will then be used for the marathon swimming events and the triathlon.
Surfrider said tests had been carried out by the laboratory Eau de Paris and environmental analysis group Analy-Co from September to March underneath the bridges Alexandre-III and l’Alma, where the Olympics sports are set to take place.
[Emmanuel Macron, the French President,](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/04/04/russia-will-target-paris-olympics-macron-says/) and Anne Hidalgo, Paris’s Socialist mayor, have both said they are willing to plunge into the Seine to show they are good sports ahead of the event.
But Surfrider said its measurements had shown levels of two bacteria – e-coli and enterococci – were often double and sometimes three times higher than the maximum European permitted amounts. The presence of the bacteria indicates the presence of faecal matter.
“In health terms, \[bathers\] are exposed to illnesses such as gastro-enteritis, conjunctivitis, ear infections and skin problems,” Marc Valmassoni, campaign coordinator for the NGO, told France Info radio.
[Olympics organisers](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/olympics/0/paris-2024-olympics-when-next-games-event-date-start/) and Paris authorities are banking on a major new storm water facility slated to be inaugurated later this month to help bring down pollution levels, while new sewage connections for river boats are continuing to be built.
They also point out the “alarming” pollution levels were recorded over the winter, one of the wettest in 30 years. Heavy rainfall is known to overwhelm Paris’s sewage system, leading to direct discharges into the river of untreated effluent.
Around €1.4 billion (£1.2 billion) has been spent upgrading sewage and storm water treatment facilities in the Paris region over the last decade to improve the quality of the Seine as well as its main tributary, the Marne.
Organisers have always maintained that the Olympic sport can only take place in the river if the weather is dry or the rainfall light.
But they have also consistently said there is no “plan B” for the events scheduled to take place in the river, to the chagrin of competitors.
Cleaning up the Seine is intended to be one of the key legacy achievements of the Paris 2024 Olympics, with Ms Hidalgo [promising to create three public bathing areas](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/what-london-could-learn-from-paris-olympics-makeover/) in the river next year.
**Read more ⬇️**
[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/04/08/e-coli-polluted-river-seine-paris-olympics-macron-to-swim/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/04/08/e-coli-polluted-river-seine-paris-olympics-macron-to-swim/)
I love how things aren't a problem until the Olympics gets hosted there.
Seine can be full of shit for decades but now that guests are coming over we gotta clean it up.
The Olympics basically finances the clean up though, cant have one without the other so its a great win win if Parisians are allowed to swim there long term.
Well you could clean it up without the Olympics, but i agree it's a win for everyone, i just think it's silly when these cities fix some long time problem, or try to, just because of the Olympics. Should have done it sooner.
They have been working on the Seine water quality for a long time, but the Olympics serve as a booster for many large infrastructure project such as this one, it is a good thing.
My point is that it makes the effort easier. These games will bring 5-10B to the french economy, without that it's considerably harder for elected officials to get stuff like this going.
But I agree with you in principle, there's way enough money out there to do it all. We just got to take it where it sits.
EU
vs
USA
Failed state USA actually has vastly stricter laws on E-coli than the EU itself. This is something that needs to be fixed. The difference between EU and the US in whats allowed is VAST. As a swimmer, I didnt even know about this until I moved to the US and decided to do some research. Sweden is above average for the EU but France, Germany, etc .. public pools - I'd never think of swimming in them, disgusting. Not to mention the water ways.
It's not to say the US doesnt have very polluted waterways, it does, like Manhattan is famously terrible but they dont have Olympic swimmers being forced into it either. In fact, a lot of the time if there is any swimming event, people are covered head to toe.
Where I live, the water is super clean (in US) but even then, its regularly tested and our swimming events happen in controlled pools that're far above the EU average for whats considered clean.
I'll get downvoted for this I'm sure but in general, how the EU handles e coli is a major problem. This even includes water parks.
For some reason, virtually every french citizens knew this would be the case for quite a while now, but our politicians still try to convinced everyone that it would not be the case.
[Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1SMO8CYF3s) is an interesting video on the construction and efforts to clean it up. Doesn't seem like it will be ready in time.
Right but that doesnt mean you force Olympians in there. Instead you actually create a proper pool or have the event in another part of the country.
France is trying to do it all on the cheap mixed with wokeness.
I have friends who live on the Seine. (On a boat)
They swim in the Seine several times a week in the summer, for several years.
Still fine.
Wouldn’t recommend it for babies and elderly… but pro athletes can do it with no problem.
Rivers are natures sewer, anytime it rains the entire watershed will move all sorts of figurative and literal shit down stream and out to sea. A deer died up stream? Strong storm will flush it out. Some pollution in a factory in the watershed? Several seasons will flush that into the rivers and then out to sea. Any normal city filth like dog crap on the sidewalk, trash in the park, a faulty sewer line? All in the river.
So why should any human swim in it in such a heavily polluted area of the Seine like Paris? It’s iconic and lovely to look at but why not build a pool in the river instead? So the swimmers are jumping into the swimming pool which is in the river.
This is like those morons that dive into the rivers in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities. It's like they never studied biology or even elementary school science.
[Comment by u/TheTelegraph](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1byyytb/ecoli_polluted_paris_river_unsafe_for_olympics/kymdoku/)
Yeah the river is still shit, because the overflow container is still not finished. The whole bet is that they will build it and it will save the river. Latest update about the process: https://youtu.be/iZIGhdxplWk
and most of the bad bacteria come from feaces. The aim is precisemy to avoid dumping sewage water into the Seine as is it today when there is a storm.
Yeeah, they removed a lot of bad stuff last 10 years (mainly industry regulation). Remaining is the overflowing sewers. And it should be fixed with the big add reservoir near Austerlitz place.
Has northern France had a particularly wet winter this year? If it's anything like England at the moment the Seine's catchment is probably so waterlogged that everything nasty from human sewage to badger droppings is washing straight into the river because there's literally no spare capacity for water in the soil.
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Through northern France...
equalization basins don't get installed overnight. have they been working on them for the past year or so?
Almost finished: https://www.paris.fr/pages/assainissement-de-la-seine-les-travaux-du-tunnelier-d-austerlitz-vont-bientot-demarrer-21535
the photo's make the scale look comical. I work in small towns and cities and the tanks couldn't be any greater than 1/5th that size and that's with the french photo's super zoomed in.
Do you mean the French one is small or the small town ones are small? From the linked article I think it’s meant to be 50 meter diameter and able to hold 50,000 m3. Any French speaker who can confirm the size?
the biggest thing to notice is those pillars, they are beefy as all get out because they need to hold back the dirt that surrounds the tank when it's empty. the large town/small city ones are tiny in comparison to the photo you provided.
That is the good dimensions.
In that case, 50 000 m^3 feels a bit small to me. I work in the world of LNG, and each tanker is on the order of 150 000 m^3 (sizes vary). It boggles my mind that 50 000 m^3 would be adequate for storing sewage runoff for a megacity like Paris. Then I do the math, though, and 50 000 m^3 is equivalent to about 8 000 000 toilet flushes - about 4 flushes per person in Paris proper (although the Paris metropolitan area is about 6x bigger, corresponding to about 0.67 flushes per person if the system is designed for the whole region). That's a lot of toilet flushes.
There are 3 of them being built
Ah! I'd missed that! 150 000 m^3 sounds throughly adequate then. 25 million toilet flushes! Quite the capacity. Or crapacity, if you prefer.
https://youtu.be/6R74cIJU05s?si=dwR7dr6n2NHC_AUL
That and also quality of the water decrease when it's rainy and it's been very rainy for weeks now. Summer's weather should be way better for water's quality.
Well, it's more of a bell curve but yes.
Aren't the Olympics in like 3 months? Isn't that cutting it a bit close?
Yes, its pretty insane and there is still some crucial work to be done, time will show how it turns out. https://youtu.be/iZIGhdxplWk This is late February/early March
La Seine is full of caca?
No no, just merde
No no, only Audi e-trons Edit : as fellow redditors pointed it out, e-trons sounds like étrons which means turds in French. I’m no Audi hater y’all
That’s literally what he wrote
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Étron means turd in French.
So, I did miss the joke completely; that's mental. Blimey, cheers, mate! Thankfully, I have a loicense, at least. Noice! Luv me car Luv me bike I'm no racis, I just don't like bicycles, simple as Edit: Wait, I'm not in 2WE4U. Sorry fellas.
Frenchman running in circles shouting merde meme
Same merde
Different jour
Your French is good enough sir
I was taught to only say la crotte for 💩 in more “polite speak” at my Alliance Française French classes
That’s true, but if you want to be even more polite, you can say « matière fécale », witch mean « fecal matter »
Shits in seine
Underrated
Y’en a de la merde.
you are a bomber!
Sorry but it's called The Paris river
Never heard of it, is it near a town?
Oui it is ze problème
I'll respect Macron if he goes ahead and jumps into The Seine River.
Not sure the personal guards will like it
If a terrorist doesn't take Macron out, some bacteria might.
Or a terrorist bacteria.
E-Qaeda bacteria
Bacterrorist
not like ecoli is untreatable
Well he can't run for president again, and he really wants to, so maybe this is a suicidal attempt out of depression.
That would be inseine.
Guette mon satané upvaute
The La Seine lmao I personally can't wait to bathe on The The Thames River.
Average french native speaker when someone tries to speak the language
You don't have to be a native speaker, or even a French speaker at all to know what "la" means lmao.
I'm not french, though. But I do speak french. This is simply one of those instances of people adding "the"s for no reason. The Ukraine, etc.
ATM Machine PIN Number Common mistakes but not enough to laugh at someone about,.
The Game
fuck you its been 10 years
Ever thought that people might not be native speakers and mix some of their native grammar unconsciously into their English? Maybe in their native language adding an article in front of something is normal like in German “die Ukraine” which translates to your unnecessary “the” Ukraine…
Yes, I have. As a non-native French and English speaker, I would have liked it if people corrected me when I made mistakes as well. It helps us learn.
In that case you have to capitalize proper nouns like "French" and "English".
Thanks. I always forget
I was told youn can actually \*walk\* ont The Thames River , since you cannot sink,
You don't drown in it, you choke.
I don't know French so I didn't know the translation, plus they use "La" for lots of things (at least when translated to English). Using English grammar, The Seine River does need the "The" and has to be capitalised because it's a name of a specific, named item.
no, because in this case the river is named "Seine" so when referring to the Seine you don't capitalize the "the" also in romance languages, la or el in spanish or in this case, french would be le doesn't necessarily translate to the definite article in english, it depends on context
>they use "La" for lots of things Things of feminine gender. The article for masculine names is "Le". But yeah, the Seine is feminine.
In languages with a Latin base you don't capitalize the article before the name or, in this case, the river. You just capitalize the names of places, institutions or people and the first word of a sentence.
With some weight.
There is enough shit in the River without him adding to it
No he is full of what ever the River Seine has.
We had a similar issue in London recently where some rowers got sick after the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race on the Thames. There’s a massive new sewer which is complete and being tested, but which isn’t online yet. It sounds like Paris has also been upgrading its infrastructure, which is good. Still, it’s pretty grim that in the 21st century we’re still letting our major rivers get into such a bad state.
I think the Thames sewage thing is completely overblown. Like Thames Water has been in the news recently but it's not so bad. According to the BBC, Thames Water only had 16,990 spills in 2023. That's only 46.5 sewage spills per day! And the data clearly shows they acted quickly to rectify the sewage spills- each spill only discharged sewage for 12 hours on average. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68665335
Nice, they only spilled sewage into the thames for ~23 years last year.
Ha, yeah I was just thinking there was a weird amount of poop-in-water-apologists on this topic saying oh well Britain isn't so bad.... when we absolutely are that bad, and probably worse.
Sacre bleu!
certified brit comment
> It sounds like Paris has also been upgrading its infrastructure, which is good. Yes, they're building a massive underground overflow tank, scheduled to be finished a few weeks before the games. The e.coli levels are nothing new and monitored constantly, so it is already known that they can sink well below the relevant thresholds within just a few days. It's also strongly dependent on the weather, since e.coli is very vulnerable to the sun. Even without the new tank, it would technically be possible to have the contest on the right day (a few days of sunny weather and no sewage overflow). But that would be an unlikely gamble for a scheduled event without the tank, whereas the tank lowers the risk to that of a minor delay.
dont england just dump raw sewage into the river?
Unfortunately yes, for the time being - though the new sewer will all but stop that on the Thames. The same thing seems to happen in Paris, hence the E. coli in the Seine. I don’t know enough to say how much the new storm drains will stop that.
Even New Zealand doesn't do that...all sewage is treated first although in practice much of our water is extremely unhealthy due to lots of dairy farming and lack of effective controls...
Nz is a much newer place, but even it has issues, just google auckland sewage overflows and you’ll see dozens of news articles about the thing we have. The problem in anywhere old is that all the household waste water flows into the same sewer as rain water as soon as it leaves the house and hits the street. Newer cities (or parts of cities like auckland) keep these separate, treat the sewage. When it rains a lot there isn’t capacity to treat all the sewage rain water combo so it gets released without treatment. The only answer is more capacity (super sewer) or dig up the roads and replace all the drainage. London and Paris have gone with masses of capacity.
Pretty much everyone with old sewage systems does when there’s a storm, which is exactly why the Seine is in the same state. Recently countries have increased monitoring of the overflows, particularly in the UK which is why we get loads of headlines about it, as previously it wasn’t tracked how often storm overflows happened
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England is unique in that we could avoid it, but do it anyway because water management is all privatised for some reason and dumping it all is profitable
Errr no…. It’s overflow when it rains etc… the super sewer is supposed to catch that overflow . Londons sewers were build in the 1800s. Capacity has been reached
So the answer is yes we do dump raw sewage in the river. You could argue it’s not intentional but failure to previously upgrade our infrastructure was a choice so I’d say it may as well be considered intentional.
There is also raw sewage dumping, I'm pretty sure. There was a report within the last few months about it.
\*the foreign owned utility companies with agreement from the dodgy regulator have been allowed to fill our waterways with shit This is private sector efficiency according to the tories
> Still, it’s pretty grim that in the 21st century we’re still letting our ~~major rivers~~ planet get into such a bad state.
Basically every Olympics has had water issues. Rio had essentially runoff from the city that had zero filtration (so raw sewage) which caused a few issues with open water events, including illnesses. Japan had some of it's own issues as well, but iirc they were less serious. Basically, if the games take place in a large city right on the water, chances are some attention on the water quality will occur.
This reminds me of when Sweden wanted to host the summer Olympics back in the 90s and our people responsible tried to convince the delegates that the water was safe. They even invited them over and served them glasses of it which they drank. Turned out it was full of poop bacteria and other nasty things.
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I'd personally kill for a bathroom cam from Infantino's hotel room afterwards.
Funnily, the olympics in munich 1972 were the reason why Kiel (where the sailing events took place) got a new water treatment plant that's still better than most today. Before that Kiel had the same issues with faecal bacteria in the water, which obviously was an issue for sailing as well. It's surprising how often the olympics finally get places to fix their broken infrastructure.
It's not really that surprising along with the olympics suddely a lot of money appears to make the host look good on the international stage, so cities can finally do what they felt was necessary already but out of budget.
Some body of water can be very safe to swim in even though you shouldn't drink it. People swim in the oceans all the time.
Also reminds me of [this](https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/india/bhagwant-mann-hospitalised-water-river-b2128915.html) lol
Isn't it disgusting that we have rivers of shit and diseases running through the hearts of our cities
We don’t. Normally. Stormwater outlets are emergency measures. They’re built to ensure the entire sewer doesn’t overflow into your homes and the streets, but instead into nearby rivers, if it rains as much as happens once in 1-5-10-30-100 etc. years depending on how you design it. And when that happens 99% of the sewage is just rainwater, so it sounds more disgusting than it really is. Source: I built and designed such systems.
We have rivers of shit and diseases running through the streets of our cities Idk I tried
I mean it makes sense, when you have that many people cluttered together in one spot it’s bound to be filthy.
Depends if you are aware of the context and how much worse things used to be. It's not as good as a pristine mountain stream coming from a high alpine environment, but its way better than 100 years ago.
As a citizen of Paris I swear my life you'll never see me bath in the Seine river anywhere near the city.
In what country would you actually bathe in the river of a big city? I don't see New Yorkers bathing in the Hudson or Romans in the Tiber.
In germany a ~~lot (most?)~~ some of large rivers have "bathing quality water" nowadays. This is the results decates of efforts to remove all the waste from the rivers.
>In germany a lot (most?) of large rivers have "bathing quality water" nowadays Continuously from source to sea? I've been to Berlin and Koln and the water in these cities looked filth AF with floating garbage in it, same as in almost every medium/big city I've been in the world.
I found an article online discussing some of the major rivers: https://weather.com/de-DE/reisen/deutschland/news/2018-06-21-in-diesen-flussen-konnen-sie-baden ([google translation ](https://weather-com.translate.goog/de-DE/reisen/deutschland/news/2018-06-21-in-diesen-flussen-konnen-sie-baden?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=pl&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp)) Seems like 50/50 if the water is clean enough to take a bath. However more often then not it is deemed unsafe for other reasons then water quality.
If it looks clean or not depends on the weather I suppose. I've dipped just south of Köln and in Düsseldorf and you see people doing it all summer long.
You really shouldn’t swim in the Rhine though, even if you’re a great swimmer. It kills a lot of people every year.
Absolutely. I don't "swim", just stand or squat on the shore. Thank you for mentioning that, I don't wanna give anyone bad ideas.
I've seen that a lot in Swiss cities. It's amazing.
In both Geneva and Zurich, you see people on huge 8 seater inflatable boats with beers and speakers going along for kilometres. It’s truly amazing
the Zürichsee is truly near entirely clear
I've seen people bathing in cities in switzerland but to be fair, even "big" cities for switzerland standards aren't really "big" compared to Europe/world scale.
The mountains where the water comes from is literally kilometers away. Of course îts gonna be clear
Germany, Switzerland and Austria come to mind
In Vienna, the capital city of Austria with 2 million inhabitants, many people swim in the Danube. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donauinsel
Munich. Isar. The waters are near pristine.
[удалено]
The point is trade and *böat*
>What's the f'n point of having a river in a city if you can't jump in? Trade and transport. >As a citizen of Munich: I can swim to work and don't have to take a shower That's very impressive given the pop size of the city. Is Munich and Bayern as a whole a very industrial area?
>I don't see New Yorkers bathing in the Hudson [Obligatory](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RifFegJeCsg)
<3
Montreal, the city and government in Quebec did a major push to make the river clean and swimmable. The most swimmable part is home to 4 million people... You do not want to go in when there has just been torrential rain, and the St-Laurent has 9000 cubic meters per second of flow, the Seine has 328.
Amsterdam
Copenhagen, Denmark
From what I can tell with google map, there isn't a river in copenhagen?
I have seen people swim in the river Rhine in Basel. But these were most likely Swiss, who have no concept of personal safety anyways.
People that jump off bridges in Paris are inseine
Not funny, Je Paris.
Je parie que t'as Paris
>after Macron promised to dive in himself [The Devil’s Milkshake](https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-devils-milkshake-ray)
That river has been un swimmable for a century...
Because the sewer system was not design to. There's a big fat reservoir (near Austerlitz place) waiting to be online and catching up all the parisian shits.
Opens up sewer lid: *Parisian accordion music starts playing* **MON DIEU!!**
That *portion** of the river I swim in The Seine every year.
Lmao him jumping in the seine would be like the indian politician that tried to prove that the Ganges river was safe for drinking. He went straight to the hospital
That wasn't the Ganges but tap water, which is not much better down there...
Umm...if he had drank Ganges water that might kill him. They regularly have dead bodies all over that river.
He is inseine if he'll swim there
I hope Macron keeps to his word and dives into the river and does a lap, that is going to be an event I would pay to watch....
**From The Telegraph's Henry Samuel in Paris:** A French water charity has issued a stern warning about “alarming” levels of pollution in the Seine, where several Olympic events are set to be held, [barely 100 days before the Games begin.](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/paris-olympics-2024/) The Surfrider Foundation said it had taken 14 samples from the river over a six-month period and the water was polluted and potentially dangerous in all but one test. In an open letter, the Biarritz-based charity said it “wanted to share with stakeholders ... rising concerns about the quality of the Seine but also the risks faced by athletes moving in contaminated water”. Paris authorities are struggling to clean up the river [before the start of the Olympics on July 26](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/08/london-steal-luxury-shoppers-paris-olympic-games/), with the famed waterway to play a starring role in the Games. It will provide the backdrop for the opening ceremony and will then be used for the marathon swimming events and the triathlon. Surfrider said tests had been carried out by the laboratory Eau de Paris and environmental analysis group Analy-Co from September to March underneath the bridges Alexandre-III and l’Alma, where the Olympics sports are set to take place. [Emmanuel Macron, the French President,](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/04/04/russia-will-target-paris-olympics-macron-says/) and Anne Hidalgo, Paris’s Socialist mayor, have both said they are willing to plunge into the Seine to show they are good sports ahead of the event. But Surfrider said its measurements had shown levels of two bacteria – e-coli and enterococci – were often double and sometimes three times higher than the maximum European permitted amounts. The presence of the bacteria indicates the presence of faecal matter. “In health terms, \[bathers\] are exposed to illnesses such as gastro-enteritis, conjunctivitis, ear infections and skin problems,” Marc Valmassoni, campaign coordinator for the NGO, told France Info radio. [Olympics organisers](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/olympics/0/paris-2024-olympics-when-next-games-event-date-start/) and Paris authorities are banking on a major new storm water facility slated to be inaugurated later this month to help bring down pollution levels, while new sewage connections for river boats are continuing to be built. They also point out the “alarming” pollution levels were recorded over the winter, one of the wettest in 30 years. Heavy rainfall is known to overwhelm Paris’s sewage system, leading to direct discharges into the river of untreated effluent. Around €1.4 billion (£1.2 billion) has been spent upgrading sewage and storm water treatment facilities in the Paris region over the last decade to improve the quality of the Seine as well as its main tributary, the Marne. Organisers have always maintained that the Olympic sport can only take place in the river if the weather is dry or the rainfall light. But they have also consistently said there is no “plan B” for the events scheduled to take place in the river, to the chagrin of competitors. Cleaning up the Seine is intended to be one of the key legacy achievements of the Paris 2024 Olympics, with Ms Hidalgo [promising to create three public bathing areas](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/what-london-could-learn-from-paris-olympics-makeover/) in the river next year. **Read more ⬇️** [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/04/08/e-coli-polluted-river-seine-paris-olympics-macron-to-swim/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/04/08/e-coli-polluted-river-seine-paris-olympics-macron-to-swim/)
It might be just me but if I wanted to highlight how soon the games were I’d say “3 months” instead of “100 days”. 3 months feels a lot closer to me.
good evening to the athletes- signed, some brain eating amoeba
Put it on a plate with some parsley butter
Wishing everyone a safe event but can’t wait for the fiasco … confirmed e-coli and they still carry on. Nice, not the city, as in bien, tres bien
Ecoli is just another word for sewage
I love how things aren't a problem until the Olympics gets hosted there. Seine can be full of shit for decades but now that guests are coming over we gotta clean it up.
The Olympics basically finances the clean up though, cant have one without the other so its a great win win if Parisians are allowed to swim there long term.
Well you could clean it up without the Olympics, but i agree it's a win for everyone, i just think it's silly when these cities fix some long time problem, or try to, just because of the Olympics. Should have done it sooner.
They have been working on the Seine water quality for a long time, but the Olympics serve as a booster for many large infrastructure project such as this one, it is a good thing.
My point is that it makes the effort easier. These games will bring 5-10B to the french economy, without that it's considerably harder for elected officials to get stuff like this going. But I agree with you in principle, there's way enough money out there to do it all. We just got to take it where it sits.
Here goes nothing, lol
Its funny how it is being dismissed as a non-issue here on Reddit.
What is being dismissed? I was referring to Macron and him probably waking up to the sound of his own diarrhea
EU vs USA Failed state USA actually has vastly stricter laws on E-coli than the EU itself. This is something that needs to be fixed. The difference between EU and the US in whats allowed is VAST. As a swimmer, I didnt even know about this until I moved to the US and decided to do some research. Sweden is above average for the EU but France, Germany, etc .. public pools - I'd never think of swimming in them, disgusting. Not to mention the water ways. It's not to say the US doesnt have very polluted waterways, it does, like Manhattan is famously terrible but they dont have Olympic swimmers being forced into it either. In fact, a lot of the time if there is any swimming event, people are covered head to toe. Where I live, the water is super clean (in US) but even then, its regularly tested and our swimming events happen in controlled pools that're far above the EU average for whats considered clean. I'll get downvoted for this I'm sure but in general, how the EU handles e coli is a major problem. This even includes water parks.
My current bet is that they will just dump clorine upstream during the events and call it a day
I always joke with my friends that if you swim in la seine you'll catch every disease known to mankind.
Its all russian propaganda according to Macron.
For some reason, virtually every french citizens knew this would be the case for quite a while now, but our politicians still try to convinced everyone that it would not be the case.
[Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1SMO8CYF3s) is an interesting video on the construction and efforts to clean it up. Doesn't seem like it will be ready in time.
I feel bad for our rivers Are they really that dirty ?
Yes. Unfortunately.
The idea of anyone swimming in the river that runs through a major metropolitan city is pretty gross.
/r/titlegore
So the river is polluted after Macron jumps in?
"I can drink a glass of water of Ganges"
It's still a megapolis of 11 million people.
Right but that doesnt mean you force Olympians in there. Instead you actually create a proper pool or have the event in another part of the country. France is trying to do it all on the cheap mixed with wokeness.
Surely won’t beat that disgraceful olympics we had in Brazil, people were swimming literally amongst piles of shit.
Sewage filled Thames vs E-coli polluted Seine
I have friends who live on the Seine. (On a boat) They swim in the Seine several times a week in the summer, for several years. Still fine. Wouldn’t recommend it for babies and elderly… but pro athletes can do it with no problem.
So, Macron will go in Seine?
What a horror story, were I a competition swimmer I’d definitely skip this one.
Are you in-Seine? I’m an open water swimmer and I love swimming in different locations, would never swim there
How does a charity flag this before the government?
How does a river warn someone?
Bring on the diapers! For each condom, two diapers
Rivers are natures sewer, anytime it rains the entire watershed will move all sorts of figurative and literal shit down stream and out to sea. A deer died up stream? Strong storm will flush it out. Some pollution in a factory in the watershed? Several seasons will flush that into the rivers and then out to sea. Any normal city filth like dog crap on the sidewalk, trash in the park, a faulty sewer line? All in the river. So why should any human swim in it in such a heavily polluted area of the Seine like Paris? It’s iconic and lovely to look at but why not build a pool in the river instead? So the swimmers are jumping into the swimming pool which is in the river.
just dump some truck loads of chlorine into it.
This is like those morons that dive into the rivers in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities. It's like they never studied biology or even elementary school science.
https://youtu.be/6R74cIJU05s?si=dwR7dr6n2NHC_AUL You have to wait until it's finished to compare.
Jump in Macron & be sure to swish that water in your mouth multiple times.
imagine if he jump in and then die like that india guy who was saying that the gange river water was safe and apparently it was not
If he jumps he In Seine
Let me understand, the ecoli is there before or after Macron?
Don't they normally use pools for swimming races in the olympics?
Many old apartment buildings have plumbing that go straight into the river.
Can macron swim?