Olympics 2024 The storage pool in Austerlitz will be inaugurated on Thursday, three months before the Olympic Games

Three years of work see the end of the tunnel, without reaching the bottom. The basin for the storage of wastewater and rainwater in Austerlitz will be inaugurated on Thursday 2 May 2024, three months before the planned Olympic events in the river. In the Jardin des Plantes district, the 30-metre-deep pool will collect rainwater and waste water to avoid dumping sewage into the Seine.

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The capital’s old sewage network was created by the engineer Eugène Belgrand in the middle of the 19th century, and is uniform, i.e. a mixture of sewage and rainwater. Heavy rain therefore causes the network to overflow, forcing this mixture to be dumped into the Seine. This is what this 100 million euro pool, equivalent to 20 Olympic swimming pools, must avoid.

Make the Seine swimmable

There is a lot of work in the Bathing Plan, where the authorities have invested around 1.4 billion euros to allow the general public to dive into the Seine from 2025. Spillage in the Seine has already increased tenfold since the end of the 1990s.

But the effectiveness of this device must be qualified. “In Paris, sewers, tunnels and basins such as Austerlitz store 1.9 million cubic meters of water. A little rain of 10 mm is 1 million cubic metres. With a heavy Cévennes rain of 20mm you will be flooded everywhere”calculates Michel Riottot, former president of France Nature Environnement (FNE) Île-de-France.

“When we (have) intense rain, we will in any case reject and we will not reach the swimmability criteria”, acknowledges Samuel Colin-Canivez, general manager of the Parisian sanitation network. But “We will inevitably improve the bacteriological load that we give to the (natural) environment. So we want to increase the number of swimming days”he asserts.

A worker died on the construction site

In 2023, a Malian worker died on the construction site, hit by a truck. A tribute was paid to him on Saturday 27 April 2024. Trade unionists and relatives of the victim condemned serious security breaches at this site run by SADE, a subsidiary of Veolia, with the city of Paris as client.

Demanded byAFPParis City Hall and Veolia recalled that the legal investigation was still ongoing “determine responsibility”ensure that it is “fully cooperated”.