“A stricter monitoring plan” for the network will be announced soon after the pollution of the Seine caused at the end of August by the malfunction of a sanitation valve which had prevented the holding of triathlon events, the deputy said on Tuesday. at Paris Town Hall Sports Pierre Rabadan during a round table. The triathlon test event “led us, with the State and the regional prefecture, to put in place a plan, which we will announce in the coming days, which is much stricter for monitoring the network,” he said. -he said during a day of debate around sport, “Demain le sport” on Radio-France (franceinfo, l’Equipe, FranceTV).
The organizers of the Paris Olympics faced serious disappointments this summer during test events in the Seine. At the end of August, when two triathlon events (para and mixed) had to be canceled due to pollution and, a little earlier, at the beginning of August, when the open water swimming events had to be canceled due to pollution caused by an episode of unusual summer rain. Pierre Rabadan confirmed Tuesday that the pollution “came from an automatic valve located at the Tolbiac plant (water treatment, editor’s note) which was indicated as closed and which in fact was faulty” and led to “a leak of wastewater which brought a little pollution and which took us just above the bacteriological threshold. “There will be extremely reinforced surveillance of all stakeholders in the river,” he summarized.
On the side of the Olympic organizing committee (Cojo), apart from perhaps planning a greater amplitude to postpone the events, there is no plan B planned for swimming anywhere other than in the river. These competitions in the Seine are preludes to the future swimming events promised for 2025 by the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo (PS), on three sites, while swimming has been prohibited there since 1923. “The political signal would be worse than anything if the Seine was swimmable at the time of the Olympic Games and was no longer swimmable afterward. The Olympic Games are sometimes criticized for the lack of sustainability in certain infrastructures,” warned François Gemenne, member of the IPCC, present at this debate on water. “It’s completely the opposite,” retorted Pierre Rabadan. The competitions “were the driving force behind the acceleration of the necessary transformations, but the objective from the start was that the general public would be able to swim there from the end of the Games, in the summer of 2025,” he said. he rocks.