I love the initiative, of course. How could I not? The idea of folks casually taking a dip in this city is really nice. I spend a lot of time beside the Seine - writing code on my laptop, even! - and being able to dangle my legs in sounds nice.
But... No matter what they say about bacteria measurements and other high quality quantitative indicators, there will still be swimming bags of potato chips and cigarette cartons and beer cans and receipts, and all the other junk Parisians tend to toss in there, even the occasional Vélib' bicycle. The thought of going for a nice swim only to whack my foot on a rusted underwater bicycle gear and then leave the water with a sandwich wrapper clinging to my back isn't very appealing. So I wonder how this will be managed, and how separated the three proposed swimming spots will be.
With that said, I went swimming in the Ohio River as a child, and I guess I'm still alive, so ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
Hopefully this introduces pressure to actually get littering taken more seriously. If there are communities who want to swim, but feel uncomfortable about it, those communities can begin to pressure the government to deal with those problems.
Given that the article mentions that there will be officially held races/ marathons, I suspect that there will be a lot of money being put into keeping the water clean and safe. It seems like the city has been very invested in improving the water quality of the Seine and I expect that to continue with the additional pressure of human swimmers.
> there will still be swimming bags of potato chips and cigarette cartons and beer cans and receipts, and all the other junk Parisians tend to toss in there
Time to enforce littering fines.
Seriously, as a French person living in Belgium, I am disgusted with how little of a shit people give about keeping their own city clean.
If we start enforcing littering fines a bit more in western europe, this shit will stop within a couple of years. It's 100% cultural and this is something we absolutely have to change in our culture.
I think most people do care about keeping their city clean, at least in western Europe. The problem is that it's enough for a very small fraction of the people to ruin it for everybody else. Besides, I'm not sure if littering fines work. I'm all for it, but the risk to get caught is incredibly low. I mean, 700000 persons driving without driving licence in France, bikes get stolen like there's no tomorrow, I could go on and on... nobody cares about fines.
Western Europe has always been cleaner than both Eastern Europe, and the US, but things have been backsliding.
Things have recently changed for the worse. eg. I was in Paris, and I could see a stark contrast between now and 10 years ago. Also, parts of Italy seem to be backsliding, and then you have parts of Croatia that look better than many western parts.
Ps. In the US, NYC and SF are pretty 'dirty' overall, but then you have mid tier cities such as Miami, Boston, D.C., that are and feel very clean overall.
As much as I hate it, the real way to achieve the level of compliance you describe is through surveillance, akin to what China does or what Black Mirror depicts.
Me neither, but it works. Japanese cities, even Tokyo, are SO much cleaner than cities in Europe, it's ridiculous. (They do have public trash cans in every convenience store, by the way.)
Culture is the reason. Japanese people have a more collectivist instead of individualist society, which promotes a shared sense of ownership in society. (At least, this is what they taught me in my Japanese courses in college)
Changing culture is hard. But, some cultural shifts have been brought about by public awareness campaigns, protests, etc.
Why not assess a fine to the original manufacturer of the litter (their logo is all over it), then use the proceeds to fund ongoing cleanup. Brands that are able to court responsible end users will find an edge in the market so will be compelled to use their marketing arms to raise awareness of the issue, perhaps even going so far as to fund their own cleanup efforts or incentivized packaging return.
The average person is reasonable and could probably be trusted to do the right thing. It's the 50% below average whom I'm worried about. You'll probably find a Pareto-like distribution on littering, i.e. ~80% of the litter is produced by ~20% of the people.
Another example that comes to mind is graffitis. My city is full of them. It takes seconds to make one, and hours to remove it. A few dozens of people could make a lot of damage within a few months.
I don't think this is the only way. I spent a couple of weeks in Rwanda last summer and was stunned by how clean the streets are both in Kigali and in the countryside.
I heard several years ago the picture was similar to neighboring countries (not good). This indicates that the cleanup is possible without introducing total surveillance.
I really don't think that's necessary. Just by having reasonable proximity to Public trashcans radically reduces littering.
Some level of perceived enforcement is required, but in reality it just needs to be a sign with a high fine on it. And finally some level of public funded cleanup groups and you can get pretty far with keeping spaces clean.
Seems that this could be addressed separately with better enforcement for littering/dumping?
People there don't regularly assault people on the street, brandish firearms, or drive vehicles without number plates. There is a possibility for law enforcement to set social expectations around dumping such that people don't actually do it out of fear of serious legal consequences.
How you imagine this? Police don't have free resources already and it is hard to catch a person throwing a bottle in a river in the moment. Video surveillance and face recognition may work but sounds dystopian.
In my observation a mix of culture and working cleaning services is a better predictor of clean streets than fines. It matters a lot if people want to live in a clean environment or they don't care. I have an empathy gap here and it's hard to understand why but I see that some people either don't mind garbage lying around or too lazy to carry it to a place where it can be disposed (nearest litter bin if they exist in this area or home if not).
I live on a boat on the seine river in meudon, facing boulogne, just outide of paris downhill, about 15mn biking from eiffel towel. Me and our neighboors enjoy swiming and padding on hot days, many friends are fishing just outside our windows. Like mentioned in the article, we don’t go in the water after heaving rains. It is a wonderful environment with trees and fresh air.
This rule applies to any water near land. You get runoff from dog, cat, bird defecation among whatever chemicals may be found on land. This is even if storm water sewage does not overflow.
I lived in Key West for half of my life. I got addicted to swimming daily and would always go, no matter what. Now I have sinusitis caused cluster headaches. When I trace back events, the first one happened about a year into the swimming. Now they are truly debilitating.
I would even add not swimming during an out-going tide if the water passes by nasty land. (nasty = like seemingly lovely mangroves where birds live or bird poo covered rocks)
Now I always check water quality reports to find the cleanest water on vacation as well. Most places do them, even if not advertised.
Are you sure it was related to the pollution/run off? Or is that just a guess?
It could possibly and simply be the fact you swam every day. A few years ago I bought my first house with a pool and have had a pool since. I swam every day for a couple years (~8 months/year), then this year I'm having a ton of swimmer's ear & sinusitis issues. My pool water is about as clean as it gets for outdoor swimming. And for me at least has been more correlated with frequency of contact with water than anything else. If my ears or sinuses act up, I take a week off from the pool and it gets better.
I cannot be 100% sure - see bio - but I am pretty sure.
All Key West waters are shitty water according to easily searchable stats, but rain runoff makes it much worse. [0]
To get to your point though, I had always hated chlorinated water even more. It will absolutely destroy your mucous membrane even if it is "clean." This destroys your first line of defense and can lead to all kinds of sensitivity after you leave the water. I believe that's the off-label benefit of those nose clips.
I had never heard about this rule, so thank you for the write up. It's one of those things that should be in a random stupid things not to do in your like rulebook that should exist.
I have a few of these rules, that I picked up at random points in my life that either saved my life later on or caused permanent damage because I was young and stupid and didn't bother listening to my elders experiences.
I have this one with power tools: "Power tool, power cool", which is intentionally silly, and that just means that if I'm using a power tool I'll put on safety glasses.
I’ve read drinking a small amount of salt water a single time during a survival situation can be beneficial versus no water. I leave it to readers to research this themselves further
It does have a coastline, and presumably certain beaches will be closer or further from sewage outflows or may be affected by algal blooms or oil spills what have you.
just a heads up that microdosing dmt (non psychoactive doses, just a mg or two) are game changing instant cures for some forms of cluster headaches. Can be worth moving to a locale where plant based medicine has at least been decriminalized.
Do you have any studies you can point me toward on this?
A quick pubmed search of `("cluster headache" OR "migraine") AND ("dmt" or "dimethyltryptamine"), 14 results, has nothing relevant.
Not all truth is published -- but I frequently see poor claims of using psilocybin ("magic mushrooms") to treat migraine/cluster headache, of which, the clinical effects are potentially dubious [0], [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] in particular which I believe to be an effect driven by the desperation for treatment [6], [7] when nothing else has worked.
Just as another data point, my ex-girlfriend also had debilitating cluster headaches. Psilocybin, not microdosing just tripping on it, would make it stop for a couple of months.
Also, you might be familiar that taking pure oxygen during an attack in known to stop the attack. The problem is that it builds a tolerance were you need more and more which brings problems of its own.
Wow! Jeez, I mean the thought of doing that myself has certainly crossed my mind in semi-jest, mid attack, but nope.
I found this old study [0] and based on that I had endoscopic sinus surgery. It stopped a 9 month cluster and I did not have another attack for almost a year. The surgeon did it because my sinuses were opaque, but the reason I did it was with the hope of the chance of cluster benefit.
Thanks. Alcohol or an empty stomach brings them on, or sometimes they just happen.
There is an instant solution to stop the pain, it’s in that study as a footnote I believe. But it’s illegal, extremely habit forming, and very expensive.
I have heard that there is a new novocaine nasal spray coming out. That should do the trick if I can ever get my hands on it.
Old cities have combined sewage system, and storm water mixes with poop. Then it comes out of the storm drain into the river
Newer cities have separate systems for storm drainage and for human waste.
This is a big problem for cities as they grow - heavy rains cause sewage outflow events. Chicago has spent 3 billion dollars on a massive underground tunnel system to try and mitigate this to help clean up the Chicago river.
Anyways - yes - lots of cities near watersheds have this problem. I would say most - fecal coliform counts have been high enough to justify warnings a variety of places I've fished or vacationed. Sometimes not that big of cities.
You can just live on a boat on a river? I assume it would involve permissions from authorities and some kind of rent etc, right? What do you do for water, electricity, sanitary services, garbage collection et cetera?
There are plenty of river ports/quays with power and water hookups. If you want to houseboat it, you really only need to move when you want to dump the septic tank (and in some areas, not even that).
The "good" spots are highly desirable and usually privately owned (or on a very long-term lease), and you often need to buy a boat to get the mooring spot beneath it. (A buddy of mine in London ended up with 3 boats while upgrading his mooring spot.)
Another options is to vagabond it, where you move your boat to a new area every week or two -- this is usually unserviced, so it's more like camping, but lets you use unofficial spots and is free.
(The last option is to find goofy loopholes. E.g., in some areas of the Thames, you can create a nesting habitat for an endangered bird on your boat, and then once the bird settles in, they can't force you to move, since doing so would destroy an important habitat. Sounds stupid but a surprising number of permanent city boats are there on some sort of loophole.)
> in some areas of the Thames, you can create a nesting habitat for an endangered bird on your boat, and then once the bird settles in, they can't force you to move, since doing so would destroy an important habitat.
Seems like the fix for that would be to force you to leave the boat where it is, but to stay off of it so as not to disturb or disrupt the bird's habitat while at the same time leaving you responsible for rent and the boat's upkeep. That way you'd have an expensive boat you can't use but must also pay for and maintain. The plus side being that nobody in their right mind would try to attract endangered birds, the downside being that in order to avoid the costs, a cruel person might harm the bird if it happened to build a nest on their boat naturally (not sure how often that actually happens when people aren't intentionally building habitats for them).
It's possible that discouraging that kind of thing just isn't worth it. Maybe the people taking up space with their houseboats aren't as big a problem as there not being enough nice habitats for a struggling species, and the loophole is a net good for the restoration of the bird population without being a major problem for others.
People would never choose the bird over not paying rent for nothing, especially because the people doing this trick would not be the one’s with a lot of money.
Here in The Netherlands, bats are protected. Bats nest in the ventilated outside walls of houses. According to law, if you want to insulate your walls and it is suspected you have bats, you now need to pay an inspector €3000-6000 just to check. If you do have bats, they need to be lured out and re-nested with another expensive operation.
What people do instead is flush their walls with low grade toxins so the bats get scared off.
Google “houseboats <european city>” and you’ll see how they are moored and connected to services. There’s many good videos on YouTube doing tours of boats if you want to go down a rabbit hole.
The distance from, say, Île Seguin to the Eiffel tower is more like 8km; certainly less than 10.
I also live in Meudon (in the hills); I recently bought an inflatable kayak to try it on the Seine but have not dared use it yet, and so far also failed to convince my kids to try it with me ;-(
Here we are, born to be kings
We're the princes of the universe
Here we belong, fighting to survive
In a world with the darkest powers
Heh
And here we are, we're the princes of the universe
Here we belong, fighting for survival
We've come to be the rulers of you all
Many (Most) of the rivers and lakes are swimmable in Switzerland, the standards for water are incredibly high, more dangerous is not knowing the currents.
Going down the Aare river from Thun/Uttigen to Bern is a hugely popular activity to do in summer, but every year a few people drown. Even so, I'd recommend it.
Swimming in Sydney Harbour is also possible. They did it for a leg of the triathalon in the olympics a couple of decades back. Wouldn't recommend though, there's a lot of bull sharks in there and they're kinda aggressive. Netted beaches and bays are the go.
I live in the eastern docklands of Amsterdam, and there's always lots of swimming here. Amsterdam has invested a lot in cleaning up its canals and other waterways and water quality has improved a lot over the past couple of decades. And there's no sharks.
I saw that, a bit further along from Kastrup sea bath, with the planes coming in to land at the airport.
I guess it's open water unlike the Seine, but it did surprise me, I felt like I was sat in quite an industrial area when a couple walked past in swimming costumes and towels.
In the 1990s, water quality in Amsterdam was pretty bad, but it's improved enormously since then. I live in the eastern docklands area and people swim a lot in the old harbour.
So is swimming in the Aare river in Bern, Limmat and Sihl rivers in Zürich, and the Arve and Rhône in Geneva. Floating down in tubes is a popular summer pastime.
Arve + Rhone in Geneva Jonction = pretty spectacle from Jonction bridge, where two distinct waters meet - crystal-clear Rhone which comes down from limestone (majority) part of Alps, has time settle any silt in Geneva lake, so it has easily 15m visibility, jut like most seas.
On the other side, Arve coming down from France is muddied right at the source by Mont blanc range, which is mostly granite. You can see the exact spot where specific stream comes into play, very gray, and it doesn't get much better afterwards.
Its enough to get big river like Rhone dirty all the way to Mediterranean sea. Also, after Jonction Rhone becomes pretty cold to just swim in even in warmest summer days. But yes many tkae it down during summer on inflatables, including us.
while the thames can be swam upriver of Putney Bridge, there are conditions as the Thames is a busy river. but there are other spots in London where one can do wild swimming.
Rotterdam here. People swim in the Maas all the time. Just be careful of the container ships and other water traffic.
There are lots of canals and rivers all across The Netherlands and people are swimming in them more and more. When I used to live in Utrecht the idea of swimming in the Oudegracht was disgusting. But I was visiting last month and saw people doing it. I still wouldn't swim in that canal.
I would like to post a small advice: know the river or lake before you go swimming into it. If you don't ask the locals.
I'm from northern Italy and we have a lot of small rivers and lakes here, from the outside most of them seem pretty innocent but there are drownings every single year.
Most people that drown here are immigrants that don't know how treacherous an alpine river or lake might be, it usually happens in the summer and is always a sad story to hear. A couple of weeks ago two people died in my province: the son went swimming, an undercurrent pulled him under the surface, then his father tried to save him and got pulled under in the same way.
Interestingly, undercurrents aren't as common as people think.
Most currents can't pull you under the water. There are notable exceptions such as obstructions, dams and rapids which can form "keepers", or sudden depth or width changes that can make the water flow extremely fast and turbulent beneath the surface (such as the strid), but those sorts of situations aren't that common.
Most drownings in rivers and lakes where someone was apparently pulled under are actually due to cold water shock. The water beneath the surface of a river can be extremely cold, which can immediately paralyse even the most experienced swimmer.
Worse, sometimes the water can be a lot colder than other times, or colder in the middle than at the sides, meaning the river could be safe sometimes and not other times, and it might seem fine when you first get in, only to find you rapidly fatigue as you move further away from the bank.
That's why I'm posting this advice, they are not common if you count all lakes and all rivers in the world but they are very common in the rivers and lakes near where I live for example.
That's why most drownings around here happen to immigrants: local people know that it is crazy to go swimming in some places, because they know that something bad happened to a lot of swimmers over the years in those points, but if you don't know that history it is easy to make that possibly fatal mistake.
I saw a video of a small stream and I mean small just 2m across a bit more in other places but it can be 10m deep! It looks like you can step in to your knees but really it's very deep.
It's in England it is called Bolton Strid. I'm not in England myself I just read about it.
Do you know if there are public resources one can check to know how to stay safe, or is asking locals the best options? My only gripe with that is that it’s not always possible, one might find oneself by a seemingly nice river/lake with nobody around.
Out of curiosity, what's dangerous about Alpine lakes? I understand that rivers can have currents that can pull and hold people underwater, but I can't think of a risk for lakes other than hypothermia.
I can only answer for the lakes near where I live and that I know, for example Lake Iseo o Lake Como.
They might look all calm and placid, but they are really deep with steep shores that are pretty irregular, think of them as a valley between two mountains filled with water with water coming in from one side and going out from the other (that's exactly what they are actually).
The water flows more rapidly beneath the surface and creates turbulences due to the irregularities of the shores, so now there are two things:
- those turbulences might pull you under very rapidly, many meters below the surface, and that might cause you a shock. If you pass out when that happens, well... you're dead.
- those turbulences and the currents sometimes detach boulders or other chunks of rock, when this happens water needs to fill the void left by the fallen rock and if you are unlucky to be in that water it can pull you down for tens of meters. 10m of water on your head increase the pressure by ~1atm, if you get pulled under by 20/30m in just a second you will pass out for sure and as in the other point... you're dead for sure.
If you go to one of those lakes and want to swim you must stay close to the shore and you must enter the lake where the shore is not steep or else you'll be risking it.
Lake Garda, Lake Idro, Lake Moro and other are very much safe on the other hand. That's why asking a local person is often wise: it just takes a couple of minutes to find someone and ask, after you know you're safe get into the water and enjoy :)
On jumping in, you can get cold water shock, which can cause involuntary gasping and loss of muscle control, leading to immediate drowning. The water doesn't even have to be that cold.
For a more technical explanation, because we had the same problem in our city, and fixed it in a similar way:
> One of the main problems has been the 19th-Century "single system" drainage infrastructure, which unites household waste water from kitchens and toilets with run-off from rain on the street.
Big cities came up with their canalization in the 18th century in two ways: open or closed canals.
A closed canal system (with proper tubes) would be safe, no dirt (street dirt, mostly dog shit) could overspill on heavy summer rains into the canals and river, but this would require about 10x larger tubes, just for the few summer days (about 10 days a year). And a normal river with normal oxygen levels can easily fixup itself after such a spill. I.e. a flowing river, no dams near cities. And no industrial sewage directly into the river (which does not happen in civilized countries since the 80ies).
Almost every european city uses an open canal system, where in those few heavy rain days during the summer (and this can likely happen during summer olympics), the canal gates need to be opened so that the street water can overspill into the river, and it mixes with the dirt water from the open canal. So you do have heavy shit pollution in the river for about 3 days. No swimming, bad smell, E.Coli poisoning, rat bacteria (black plague).
So what a few richer cities, or the stupid ones which destroyed the natural cleaning abilities of the river by building dams near their cities for electricity (such as my city Graz, Austria), had to do, was to build such huge overspill cylinders or side canals to keep it from flowing directly into the river, but into their water treatment plant instead.
With more southern cities this would be impossible, as the rainfall is too heavy. E.g. in Houston you'll get a downpoor for 20minutes, with streets and canals flooded, cars need to stop, but then it goes on. In such subtropical cities you cannot think of building closed canal systems or such side spill reservoirs. The peek volume is way too high to be able to control it. And their rivers do contain poisonous snakes and alligators anyway.
>And their rivers do contain poisonous snakes and alligators anyway.
Alligators and poisonous snakes are not as much of an impediment to swimming as you would think. Here in Florida, we have plenty of people swimming in springs, lakes, and rivers that have gators in or nearby. The gators know to stay far away from people whose splashing and noise disrupt the fish and small animals they eat.
You can go to springs that get absolutely packed full all summer long, to where you can't swing your arms without hitting someone else, canoe 100yd outside the (unmarked) swimming area, and see gators sitting idly by near the banks without a care in the world.
The problem you didn't touch on specifically is that it still makes sense to separate sewage from runoff, which is not cheap and becoming increasingly common in major US cities. Untreated sewage mixed with storm runoff makes for far worse water quality conditions than merely runoff.
Sure, a closed system is always preferred. But bigger cities just cannot afford to change all tubes now.
Some did though. Paris or my city are just too big, or don't have enough time/budget.
> A closed canal system (with proper tubes) would be safe, no dirt (street dirt, mostly dog shit) could overspill on heavy summer rains into the canals and river
There is a logic step I'm missing here. I fail to see how a closed canal system is safer. Will the dirty water not, by definition, end up in the lowest point anyway, i.e. the river? Whether the canals are open or closed? I mean, the dirty water is not just going to disappear, is it?
I live in Basel, Switzerland, where it is common sport to jump into the river Rhine on a hot day, and float right through historic downtown.
It’s a marvellous thing, even just to watch. Really adds to quality of life!
Edit: Missed the other comment by a fellow Baseler.
Rented a boat on the seine once, close to Paris ( near boulogne). We saw people swimming right next to our boat. The problem is that we also knew the boat watercloset went directly outside in the river. You could even see the stream of water and feces rushing out everytime you flushed it.
There are rules about when you can empty those bilge tanks -- you don't do it when docked and you don't do it when travelling up a river with people swimming in it.
> You could even see the stream of water and feces rushing out everytime you flushed it.
What you did was illegal. Boats are not allowed to discharge waste into water inland or at sea unless 10 miles out at sea (USA and I'm sure most other nations). If caught the fines are quite severe. You must flush into a holding tank which is emptied by vacuum while at port. OR discharge once far out at sea.
Though since you rented this was likely operator error due to inexperience. Some boats have different plumbing systems with a Y valve that diverts to holding tank or overboard. Some boats have no Y valve so they flush directly into a tank that also has a macerator pump that empties the tank while at sea. The pump switch is usually on the dashboard OR sometimes in the bathroom and people mistake the macerator pump button for the flush button. Or they try to turn something on the dash and hit the macerator pump switch by accident.
Next time you rent a boat please make sure you are familiar with the sewage system function. The rental facility will show you how it operates properly.
i rented the boat via airbnb, and we did absolutely nothing special. I know nothing about boats but my intuition was that this boat had a direct hose from the WC to the river. It's those kinds of appartment boat that remain docked all year long and probably don't even have a working engine.
This must have been a really old boat that was grandfathered in before EU RCD rules went into effect. You never really get away from feces in the water. Any natural body is going to have fish, animal, and even human waste. But you can control for the quantity. Water plant life is hugely important to natural filtering. They can be overwhelmed and destroyed by stormwater, sewage runoff, and chemical runoff.
For a bit of added context - swimming in Seine is way less risky already these days. The son of mayor of Paris has made a bit of a name for himself when he swam down the whole length of the river in 2021:
>For the 2024 Summer Olympics, swimming events will take place in that river, so authorities have spent $1.6 billion on a solution. They dug a giant reservoir to capture untreated sewage before it flows into the channel.
Paris like most older cities has a combined storm and sewage system. The problem always is when there is too much rain the treatment plant can't handle the volume so it get dumped into the river untreated. To fix that they're building a huge holding reservoir so they can capture sewage + storm water and feed it slowly into the waste treatment plant instead of dumping it into the Seine.
Added. I've read elsewhere that the Seine is often safe to swim in already. Hope is this will turn often safe to to always or usually safe.
There have been quite a few improvements since I've lived in Paris (early 2000s). I've never really tried the Seine itself, but did quite a few swims in Marne (its tributary that flows in just outside the inner city limits) and the canals.
They have been cleaning it for decades now, they did not start just now. It’s more of an impetus to go all the way to make it swimmable. In the end, who cares as long as the result is there?
In this case, you can rest assured that they’ve been doing a huge amount of work (both politicians enacting regulations, although funding could always have been better, local councils who worked on policies and outreach, scientists, and engineers) for the sake of having a clean river and more biodiversity. This effort more or less started in the 1990s. Chirac, who used to be Mayor of Paris, promised to swim in the Seine within 3 years when he unveiled a cleaning up effort in 1988. Which was obviously propaganda, but still the will was there.
I don’t know what paris is doing here, but I doubt it.
It’s fairly standard practice for triathlons to dump a whole bunch of bleach into a lake or river to make it safe to swim in for a couple of days, but without continual treatment it quickly goes back to normal.
> It’s fairly standard practice for triathlons to dump a whole bunch of bleach into a lake or river to make it safe to swim
I'm not sure where this might be standard practice, but this would be very illegal in most of Europe. So that's not what is going to be done (as explained in the article).
I just read the story above about a guy jumping in the river with a French girl he had met an hour before and immediately I connected DD with the girl’s cup size.
My aunt used to live in Paris. I remember, she used to come home and tell us these stories about being abroad. And I remember she told us that she jumped into the river once, barefoot. She smiled,
leapt without looking and tumbled into the Seine.
The water was freezing, she spent a month sneezing, but said she would do it again. Here's to the ones who dream, foolish as they may seem. Here's to the hearts that ache, here's to the mess we make.
As an occasional kayaker and outdoor swimmer I am appalled at what greedy water companies (looking at you, Thames Water) and sloppy environmental enforcement have done to river and beaches in the UK. It is an absolute disgrace that the government have allowed the current state of affairs.
With climate change raising water temperatures in lakes, ponds and potentially rivers, it’s important to remember the risk of N. fowleri (brain eating amoeba):
For those in the know, was this hundred year ban on swimming in the Seine due to pollution reasonable? I find it hard to wrap my head around a liberal European country letting a river stay so contaminated it's dangerous to swim in, at least in this century.
There are limits to how much remediation you can do to river water quality. Not that people shouldn't try, but if e.g. upstream sites leach heavy metals, or biological contaminants deep in ground water, there's only so much you can do.
Brisbane (where I live) the river is affectionately called 'the brown snake' mainly because of silt. Even though sand mining/dredging has ended, the river is silty still. Is that why swimming isn't recommended? No: its because upstream on oxley creek, major industrial and agricultural runoff issues during historic floods in the last 10-20 years have raised contamination, fecal coliform and other problems such that you risk serious antibiotic resistant bugs if you accidentally ingest too much, or get it in cuts (I know because I row, and a rowing colleague wound up on IV antibiotics with amputation being discussed from a deep cut)
When it floods in brisbane, associated creeks continue to leach the effects of 100+ years of industrial waste and effluent into the water. Nearby cities have land which is capped 2m deep over what was septic tank discharge, it is said that shigella is still a significant risk if you dig into the soil. I don't know, I thought it died, but perhaps it persists?
Well.. that and the bullsharks but we're talking about pollution.
Yes, the Thames is coming back to life and significant fish numbers have risen in the last decade, we're miles off "the great stink" which caused Bazalgette to construct the sewers on the riverbank. Is it always entirely safe to "be in" -well no. Sources upstream occasionally dump sewage overflow along the length of the Thames. Its meant to be emergency only, but sewage overflow has to be dealt with pretty rapidly. They try not to. What do you do, when the system is overloaded?
I am amazed Paris has been able to restore river health enough to do this. Well done!
Bazalgette 2.0 - post millennium mega sewer on steroids.
We’re building a 25km Super Sewer under the Thames to intercept those nasty spills and clean up our river for the good of the city, its wildlife and you.
Impressive and hopefully enough for a few years. It's a massive project with many tunnel lines, deep sink holes to pump stations and tunnel boring machine launch and recovery points etc.
Until then - don't flush those f-ing wet wipes!! :-)
German here.
You can absolutely remediate heavily polluted rivers. Best example might be the Rhine. It was so toxic in the 70s that everything in it died. Now it's a nice river with lots of living things and you can absolutely swim in it. It's still dangerous because of ships and currents, but at least the water itself won't kill you.
But there are still lots of other rivers where remediation takes still place, e.g. because the rivers was used for raw sewage.
> I find it hard to wrap my head around a liberal European country letting a river stay so contaminated it's dangerous to swim in, at least in this century.
You may not want to look up if swimming in the Thames is safe.
But it's not banned. You can officially swim at a bunch of places, including the disgusting inner London Docklands area, as well as the dock2dock event. I think the idea is that it's fine providing you don't swallow any of the water... Everyone I know who's done it (mostly from my tri club) has gotten ill afterwards.
AFAIK the main problem with the Seine isn't industrial pollution, it's black water biological pollution that results of how the sewers have been designed: unlike in most cities, in Paris the sewers collect both wastewater and rainwater, but when it rains “too much” (and the ceiling isn't that high) then the system overflow to the Seine, bringing a lot of heavily poluted water to it.
Plenty of environmentalism is just for future projects. Canada is willing to derail all sorts of new projects over pollution concerns, but it wasn't until 2020 that we stopped a pulp mill from just dumping their waste in a estuary and they thought that the government wasn't serious, so they didn't take meaningful action.
Stop the bleeding is an acceptable policy for these types of things. Just because other existing projects have pollution concerns isn't a good reason to approve new projects with pollution concerns. And once you cut off creating new projects you can slowly get through the rest of the backlog of existing issues which will either get fixed or die out eventually.
I find it hard to wrap my head around a liberal European country letting a river stay so contaminated it's dangerous to swim in, at least in this century.
I think your assumptions around liberal European countries is seriously flawed.
I don't know if there are any rivers going through major european cities that I would consider safe to swim in.
You have to understand that the current-day environmentalism is only a recent phenomena, while the waters have been getting polluted for centuries. It just takes lot of time and effort to turn that around.
The Danube running through Vienna is safe to swim in: https://www.wien.gv.at/forschung/laboratorien/umweltmedizin/...
The water quality doesn't protect you from the current or the heavy boat traffic through. So most swimming is done in a disconnected side channel called "Alte Donau".
The rapids in the city center are famously clean enough för salmon and trout, but like any densely populated area there are also places and times of the year when the water isn’t good for swimming.
Well, it was fixed less than a quarter of the way through this century. For a city the size of Paris, with a sewer system more than a century old, I would say they did well.
For the poor soul that had to read this, these are typical places people would answer. I literally walk through Gare du Nord every week at midnight and never even had a bad look. Sure, drug addicts and black market smokes, your typical poor area.
You are actually more likely to get mugged on the Champs Elysées or the 16th.
I saw folk swimming in the East River off of Queens here in NYC and I was really pumped. I may have to check that spot out this year. There's whales and seals again in the harbor too. It's amazing what decades of focused effort and time can do to clean up places. May we continue to do this the world round as we collectively grow to care for our planet a bit more (in order to preserve ourselves of course) here.
While certainly not the intention of media outlets worldwide abetting this PR stunt of a socialist mayor, it does highlight the question of
a) was the Seine (or any urban river) really that much cleaner 100 years ago?
b) since most cities with a polluted river tend to be situated down-stream – what actually did mayor Hidalgo really do in order to demand the praise here? I assume not much other than stop enforcing restrictions?
_Cleaner_? I'd assume it was _far_ worse 100 years ago.
I'm not sure what the mayor being socialist has to do with it. All across Europe, in every political system, there are water cleanup projects. Pretty much any big old city is going to have these problems unless you do _serious_ remediation.
> I'm not sure what the mayor being socialist has to do with it.
Socialists tend to be more interested in public access to common goods. Swimmable rivers seem relevant. A neoliberal mayor would probably prefer people to pay to swim in commercial swimming pools.
Although the mayor who actually does it is socialist, it was initiated by a right-wing mayor (Jacques Chirac, who went on to become president) famously announcing he would himself swim in the Seine in the 90s (he didn't).
a) it was probably not cleaner 100 years ago, but that's the year when swimming in the Seine was banned because of pollution
b) Paris is not really downstream of any large city on the Seine and most of the pollution by far is produced by Paris and its suburbs, not by Troyes 150 km upstream.
What they are doing to reduce pollution is explained in detail in the linked article.
This word doesn't have the same meaning in Europe, than it has in the US. "Socialist" mainly describes some sort of social democratism, even when some people calling themselves socialist won't accept that label for themselves.
On the other hand in the US you seem to call everything left of the republicans "socialist" and everything left of right wing democrats "marxist". And you even label totally unrelated things like gender expression "marxist".
The phenomenon of Americans calling things like "working public transport" or "clean water" "communism" has led to a reaction where people who want all sorts of perfectly normal social-democrat things start labelling themselves as "communist" on the internet. It's very silly.
I think Republicans have done a lot make communism a positive thing. For decades they labeled everything good as "communism", and as a result, a lot of Americans now want communism, because that clearly means public transport, clean water, better health care, etc.
But... No matter what they say about bacteria measurements and other high quality quantitative indicators, there will still be swimming bags of potato chips and cigarette cartons and beer cans and receipts, and all the other junk Parisians tend to toss in there, even the occasional Vélib' bicycle. The thought of going for a nice swim only to whack my foot on a rusted underwater bicycle gear and then leave the water with a sandwich wrapper clinging to my back isn't very appealing. So I wonder how this will be managed, and how separated the three proposed swimming spots will be.
With that said, I went swimming in the Ohio River as a child, and I guess I'm still alive, so ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯