THE MEGA PROJECT
Dan Angelescu, CEO of the Fluidon company, has been working for the city of Paris since 2017 on a long-term project to make the Seine swimmable. The 2024 Games are an excellent opportunity to speed up the process in order to host some sporting events in the famous river, as happened at the first Olympic Games in Paris in 1900. According to Angelescu, the concentration levels of two bacteria, E.coli and Enterococcus, both indicators of faecal material in water, are the challenge to achieve success. To prevent this from happening next summer, the city is building a massive underground pool in the south of Paris, with a capacity of 50,000 cubic meters, equivalent to about 20 Olympic swimming pools. The Austerlitz reservoir will collect rainwater to avoid traffic jams and have water quality problems Another part of the plan is to complete the conversion of some houses upstream, which discharged obsolete wastewater into the river, to a new connection to the system sewer. Paris hopes to reap benefits beyond the Olympics. Colombe Brossel, head of public spaces and waste reduction, said the main goal is to enable people along the Seine to be able to swim there by 2025, as a “legacy” from the Olympics.
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