Parisian owners, you can make the Seine cleaner, and help make it… a place for swimming!
The equation is quite simple: a faulty or non-compliant sewer connection, and all your wastewater goes into rainwater and nature, including the Seine, instead of going to the treatment plants.
A connection to standards and well managed allows to preserve the river, the environment, and to build projects such as that of creating healthy and permanent bathing places in the heart of Paris!
This is the whole point of the 1.4 billion euros “Bathing Plan”, launched three years ago at the scale of Greater Paris, to clean up the Seine and the Marne from the wastewater that flows into the two rivers.
Among the flagship measures, a compliance campaign for homeowners who must move into high gear.
23 places in Ile-de-France
The objective is that of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, of which several nautical events are to take place in the capital. The Games would be the ideal lever to perpetuate three, then eventually five Parisian bathing places, and 18 in small and large crowns, identified by the Paris Urban Planning Workshop (Apur) and for which feasibility studies have been carried out since 2018. In the 16th century, the Allée du Bord-de-l'eau, very close to the Paris campsite and the Bagatelle gardens, and the Trocadéro; in the heart of the capital, the Rives-de-Seine park, at the level of Pont-Neuf (1st) and Châtelet (4th); to the east, the port of Bercy (12th century). These 5 sites are the subject of the commitment protocol signed at the end of 2019 between the partners, with the ambition to "restore the rivers to their good ecological condition and allow swimming".
Where is this "ecological reconquest" then?
The “Water quality and bathing” steering committee, co-chaired by the regional prefect and the mayor of Paris, met last week for a progress report on the objectives.
And all the partners, interdepartmental sanitation union (Siaap), Haropa, Voies navigables de France, water agency, communities, State, agree on the accelerator to give to the most difficult axis to directing and controlling in the territories: private connections.
Encourage individuals to carry out a diagnosis of their connection
Hence the launch of an incentive and information campaign, and the commissioning, since April 12, of an Internet platform dedicated to individuals intended to help them in their diagnostic process, called monbranchement. .Fr.
According to the Siaap, 2,000 owners connected to it in just over a month, when around 35,000 buildings are affected.
Read alsoBathing in the Seine: "The latest water quality readings are very promising!"
"This is the subject on which we still need a lot of progress," confirms Célia Blauel, deputy mayor of Paris in charge of the Seine.
The rest is progressing very well, in particular the connection of boats which is in progress and the major renovation works of the public networks.
For this aspect of private connections, people need to know what aids are available to them.
The City has decided to provide 3 million euros to support compliance upgrades, in addition to the already existing subsidies.
We want to ensure that the remainder of the charge for individuals is as low as possible.
“It is still around 1,500 euros on an investment of up to 12,000 euros.
Parisians unconvinced
The pieces of the puzzle therefore come together to give Parisians all the guarantees of safety and make them want to take a dip in the shade of the Eiffel Tower.
However, there remains the psychological variable, which still seems very, very far from leaning in favor of the plunge.
VIDEO.
Would you consider swimming in the Seine?
“It doesn't appeal to me at all, and I don't really see how we can ensure that the water stays clean, grimace two friends walking on the right bank.
In any case, it will already be good if it helps to partially clean up and improve connections, ”they admit.
“Me, I live in Brittany.
So frankly, even clean, I think I really prefer the sea, ”sweeps one of them.
A little further on, sitting by the river with a book, Agathe is surprised.
“When you see all the boats passing by, it is hard to imagine how to guarantee cleanliness, even by repairing all the networks, estimates the 15-year-old girl.
I don't think that will tempt me.
"
Trocadéro (16th century), Sunday 23 May.
For Flavie, Parisienne, even cleansed, the Seine carries too many currents to make you want to swim there.
LP / Elodie Soulié
Ditto for these two Parisians having a picnic on the pedestrian platform.
"To bathe here?
No way !
»Laughs Barbara and Laure, in unison.
"We know that this water will never be clean, and even if it becomes the quality of swimming pools, I hate the swimming pool", asserts Barbara.
"It would be the icing on the cake of Paris-Plages"
From Trocadéro to Pont-Neuf, another site defined for swimming, the question arouses at best an approving but skeptical astonishment, most often a recalcitrant pout.
"It would be sure that it would be the icing on the cake of Paris-Plages", greets a thirty-something in a scooter, "but frankly I imagine badly".
While looking well, one manages all the same to cross some seduced walkers… but decidedly always hesitant, for other reasons.
So Flavie, out for a walk with her daughter, for whom "more than pollution, it is rather the currents that make me think that no, I don't want that".
