the essential
Guest of - this Wednesday morning, Marc Guillaume, the prefect of the Île-de-France region and prefect of Paris, announced that “the Seine will not be swimmable in a few days”.
The Seine will still not be swimmable at the beginning of July, less than a month before the start of the Olympic Games (July 26 – August 11) and the events in the Seine which are planned there, warned the prefect of Ile-de-France on Wednesday. France Marc Guillaume. “The Seine will not be swimmable in a few days,” the senior official declared on -, highlighting “the flow of the Seine that we have, this morning, still more than 480 m3/second.”
This high flow, caused by precipitation at the end of a rainy spring, led to the postponement of a rehearsal of the opening ceremony, which was scheduled for Monday. It then rose to 650 m3/second. A high flow rate “mathematically increases the speed of the boats” which would currently take “15 minutes less” on the route, the regional prefecture explained on Friday. The usual flow rate in summer is around 100 m3/second.
A plan B imagined?
“We have not had weather conditions, for six months, which are very classic,” recalled Marc Guillaume, stressing that the Bathing Plan carried out for almost a decade by the State and the Ile-de-France communities, with 1.4 billion euros of investment to make the Seine and the Marne swimmable, “is not enough if the weather is autumn or winter”. The regional prefect intends to swim in the Seine, to set an example, “the day we can”.
\ud83d\udd34 Olympic Games \u27a1\ufe0f “With the flow we have […] the Seine will not be swimmable in a few days”, Marc Guillaume, prefect of the Île-de-France region, prefect of Paris. pic.twitter.com/KXmkvfVnGa
— - (@-) https://twitter.com/-/status/1805843353788907720?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, who postponed her historic dive into the Seine due to bad weather and early legislative elections, planned to swim the week of July 15 “or the week after”, that of the ceremony opening. In an interview with Ouest-France on Wednesday, she said she was “very confident” about the arrival of favorable weather in time for the Olympics.
Suspense remains over the holding of the Olympic events since the “test events” of August 2023 which had to be largely canceled due to insufficient water quality. In the event of intense precipitation, untreated water – a mixture of rain and wastewater – can be released into the river, a phenomenon that retention works inaugurated just before the Games are intended to prevent. Plan B consists of postponing the tests for a few days, but not changing location.
