an NGO sounds the alarm on the state of the waters of the Seine | EUROtoday

Published on : 04/08/2024 – 08:43Modified : 04/08/2024 – 3:41 p.m.

3 minutes

Results that fear. Nearly 100 days earlier than the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, the NGO Surfrider Foundation warned on Monday April 8 of the “alarming” state of the waters of the Seine, the place a number of occasions are to be held, after finishing up a sampling marketing campaign over six months, exterior the interval deliberate for swimming.

Out of 14 measurements that the affiliation carried out between the top of September 2023 and the top of March 2024 underneath the Alexandre-III and Alma bridges, websites of future triathlon and open water swimming occasions, 13 had been discovered to be “above or even very well above” the beneficial thresholds.

With regard to the 2006 European “swimming” directive and the scales of swimming and triathlon federations, the concentrations of two micro organism indicative of fecal contamination, Escherichia coli and enterococci, should not exceed 1,000 colony forming items (cfu) /100 ml in E. coli and 400 cfu/100 ml in enterococci. Beyond that, the water is taken into account unsuitable for swimming.

Analyzes carried out by Surfrider present concentrations of E.coli frequently greater than 2,000 cfu/100 ml (most of seven,250 underneath the Alma bridge on February 7) and 500 cfu/100 ml for enterococci (most of 1,190 on the identical date).

Faced with these “alarming” outcomes, Surfrider expresses its “increasing concerns about the quality of the water of the Seine” and factors out the “risks” for athletes, and past for Ile-de-France residents, “of evolving in contaminated water” .

See additionallyCleaning the Seine: the race earlier than the Olympic Games

Weather elements

But “there was never any question of opening swimming in the Seine all year round”, responded on France Info the regional prefect Marc Guillaume, for whom “it makes no sense to go and do samples currently”.

“Strong sunshine, low precipitation, long diurnal duration, low river flow” are the climate elements “unattainable in winter” which quite the opposite enable swimming within the Seine in summer time, for his half affirmed, in a response to the 'AFP, Pierre Rabadan, deputy for the Olympics and the Seine at Paris city corridor.

However, different analyzes despatched to AFP on the finish of 2023 by the city corridor had already proven that between June and September 2023, not one of the 14 Parisian water sampling factors had reached a enough degree of high quality with regard to the European directives.

And, in August 2023, the gown rehearsal for a number of Olympic occasions needed to be canceled as a consequence of water high quality thresholds that had been clearly exceeded.

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Town corridor and prefecture, on the head of the steering committee for the plan into which the State and communities have injected 1.4 billion euros to make the river swimmable, recall that 5 main works ought to guarantee a clear Seine. summer time might be operational “within a few weeks”.

The triathlon occasions (July 30 and 31, August 5) and open water swimming, now referred to as marathon swimming (August 8 and 9), stay threatened by heavy precipitation which might degrade the water of the Seine, by way of discharge into its mattress of wastewater blended with rainwater.

In the occasion of a “big storm” or “very heavy rain” making it unsuitable, “contingency days could be used” to postpone the exams “by one or two days”, recalled Marc Guillaume.

With the efforts made, “the quality of the water in the Seine will be there for the Olympics,” assured the regional prefecture in a press launch.

With AFP