Paris 2024, the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad, are scheduled to begin later this month. A big part of summer Olympic games are the swimming events. The open water 10k swims are supposed to take place in the city’s famed river Seine, but if the city can’t get E. coli bacteria colony numbers down to a safe level, it’ll have to be moved.
Why is there so much shit in the Seine? It has a lot to do with the city’s combined sewer drainage system. City street rainwater and house poop water all drains through the same pipes, and when there’s too much of it for the water treatment plants to handle, the backup goes right into the river.
Test results this week showed improving conditions on the Seine, with enterococci and E. coli levels below allowed limits as the rains abated in the area. During June testing, the river had not only failed all bacteria tests, but results showed ten times the required limit to allow Olympic swimming to take place. If the river isn’t cleaned up in time, open water events will be moved to a different river, and the triathlon will be shortened to a (totally lame) duathlon.
Paris is an extremely old city, and the sewer system was first designed in 1806 to prevent rainwater from collecting in the streets. Obviously the sewers have been updated to incorporate indoor plumbing, but it’s still quite an antiquated system. At one point all of the city’s sewage ran directly into the river, Rainwater runoff and plumbing all runs through the same pipes, so when it rains too much, the water levels rise to the point that sewer water once again runs into the famed river. The city has invested millions of euros to capture runoff and divert water away from the Seine, but it’s currently unclear whether efforts will be enough to make the river swimmable.
Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo and French president Emmanuel Macron have both committed to swimming in the Seine themselves as a demonstration of the river’s cleanliness, but both have postponed their plunges until later in the month.