Paris To Open River Seine for Olympics, Paralympic Events After Being Banned for 100 Years Due to Filthy Water

Paris' iconic river - River Seine - will be among the highlights of the upcoming Olympics after a century. According to reports, the country will bring back swimming into the river.

Paris Is Cleaning Up River Seine

With just one year before the 2024 Paris Olympics, the nation is finishing a historic cleanup that will soon allow divers and swimmers to return to the River Seine, BBC reported.

Due to a €1.4 billion (£1.2 billion; $1.6 billion) redevelopment initiative that has been widely praised as a success, city swimming, which was banned for a century due to the dirty water, is expected to be one of the key legacy events of the Games.

In addition to the triathlon, marathon swimming, and Para-triathlon planned to take place in the Seine in the heart of Paris, three open-air swimming sites will be available from the quayside by 2025.

The amount of fecal bacteria entering rivers has significantly decreased due to improvements over the past 20 years.

They built a vast underground reservoir that stores run-off in times of heavy rain. There is a massive 112-foot cylindrical space that is 50 meters wide below it that can hold water from 20 Olympic swimming pools.

The Seine has served as the sewage system's safety valve until now. According to Samuel Colin-Canivez, if they hadn't occasionally allowed sewage into the river, it would have backed up into people's homes. The overflow will now be transported via tunnel to the reservoir, which can be held for a day or two while the system returns to normal. After that, it will be transported as usual to the treatment facilities.

The mega basin will be ready by the time the Games begin in late July of the following year. The Games' opening ceremony will feature a flotilla of 160 boats carrying 10,000 athletes down a 6-kilometer (3.7-mile) stretch of the river to the Eiffel Tower.

What Happened to River Seine?

Like many Western towns, Paris saw a sharp loss in river quality due to upstream industrial effluent and a growing population's demand for sanitary facilities. Only three kinds of fish were identified in the city in the 1960s due to the decline in aquatic life.

The government outlawed swimming in 1923, but an annual Christmas river race continued until World War Two. The "single-system" drainage infrastructure from the 19th century, which combines used water from bathrooms and kitchens with sewage from toilets, has been one of the main issues.

This normally travels to treatment facilities outside through a network of underground tubes. The system becomes saturated during periods of heavy rain, and the extra water must be discharged into the Seine.

According to Pierre Rabadan, the deputy mayor of Paris in charge of the Olympics, when people see competitors swimming in the Seine without any medical issues, they will feel confident enough to start swimming in the Seine again. Our contribution to the future is this.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo announced they would open the Seine for public swimming after the Olympics. She added that she wanted the river to be a "major legacy" of the 2024 Paris Olympics, The Guardian reported.

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