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.
