The Journal. - The Paris Olympics’ $1.5 Billion Poop Problem

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

Today, Olympics officials in Paris postponed the men’s triathlon because of elevated E. coli levels in the River Seine, where the event was set to take place. WSJ’s Joshua Robinson reports on how decades of trying to clean up the river may not have been successful.  Further Reading: - Paris Olympics Postpones Triathlon Because of Pollution in River Seine  - Yes, They’re Actually Doing Olympic Swimming in the River Seine. Gulp.   - Herculean Feat in Paris Olympics: Make the Seine Safe to Swim   Further Listening: - Simone Biles and the Power of Saying No  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The city of Paris is known for the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and also the river Seine. The Seine winds all the way through Paris, east-west, and cuts the city in half. Our colleague Joshua Robinson lives in Paris, and he says the river is the center of everything in the city. You define where you live, where you work, whether it's on the left bank or the right bank. And the Seine, just as a river, is a place to hang out. People on sunny evenings in the summer will sit out there and bring bottles of wine and

cheese and smoke. And it's just a, almost a public park for people. And the Senn is also taking center stage at this year's Olympics. It was the key part of the opening ceremonies, and there are two events where Olympic athletes will actually get into the water and swim. The triathlon and the marathon swim. Have you ever wanted to swim in the zen? Absolutely not.

Because I'm not a crazy person. Why not? Why is that idea so absurd? I think everyone just has a kind of common sense understanding that these waters that you can't see the bottom of, that you see things floating in all the time, where people dump cigarette butts and empty bottles and occasionally bike-share bikes. I think the idea of then looking down into the water and seeing floating plastic bags and other horrible things sort of is a black eye for the city.

To put it bluntly, the Seine is full of crap, and with sewage and wastewater flowing into the river when it rains, it's also full of dangerous bacteria. So, for the past few years, the city has been scrambling to clean up the Seine, in hopes of having it safe enough to swim in for the 2024 Olympics. I think it's very important for the image of Paris because it's become such a set of headlines. This is what Paris has kind of set itself up to make the centerpiece of its Olympics. And the stakes are quite high. The embarrassment level, if they don't pull this off, will be extremely high.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Tuesday, July 30th. Coming up on the show, Paris' race to clean up the Seine comes down to the wire. The Seine wasn't always considered a toxic waterway. The Seine, believe it or not, was swimmable at the turn of the 20th century. People actually used to swim in it.

People on hot days would just go for a dip, as you would if you lived at the seaside. There were swimming clubs. Competitors in the five mile through Paris swim dive in by dozens and the river Seine becomes a seething mass of splashing arms

and kicking legs like a school of porpoises breaking surface. In 1900, when Paris first hosted the Olympics, this was the first of three times, because they've hosted again in 2024 and now 2024, they had seven swimming events actually in the Seine. Like many old cities, the Seine was the economic heart of Paris. And it was also where the city would direct the overflow of sewage, especially when it rained.

And in Paris, it rains a lot. Paris is a very ancient sewer system, and it doesn't require very much rainwater for it to overflow and kind of saturate the system, meaning that sewage goes straight into the Seine and flows out to the sea. This is true of many major cities with rivers. It's true of New York too. When the sewer system is equipped to handle a certain amount of both sewage and just rainwater,

as soon as it gets overloaded with heavy rain, then it has no place to go. So the only place is to dump it into the sand and to kind of clear it. As the city's population grew, the amount of sewage that ended up in the river got worse. It caused a large amount of dangerous bacteria to grow there. The big one is E. coli, which we all know from tainted food and other sort of deeply unsanitary things.

And you don't want to be ingesting that just because it will wreak havoc on your insides and cause terrible digestive issues. The bacteria in the Seine got so bad that in 1923, the city banned swimming. But Parisians always dreamed about one day cleaning it up, and going back to the days when it was safe enough to take a dip. In the 1980s, the city started modernizing its sewage system, trying to limit the amount of wastewater going into the river. But it didn't really solve the problem.

In 1990, then-Mayor Jacques Chirac pledged to clean up the river and actually swim in it. But it didn't happen. Chirac left office, and the Seine was still dirty. And it looked like it was going to stay that way, until the possibility of the Olympics came around. In 2015, Paris made a bid to host the Olympics, and the Seine was at the heart of its pitch.

Here's Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo making the case to the International Olympic Committee. We will return the river Seine to the people as a place where they can swim. In my vision, that will be historic and a little futuristic. They were going to attempt this unprecedented opening ceremony where instead of putting athletes on a path to just walk into the stadium with their flags, they were going to attempt this unprecedented opening ceremony where instead of putting athletes on a path to just walk into the stadium with their flags, they were going to put them on boats and float them down the Seine. And they weren't just going to put them on the river, they were also going to put them in the river with the open water swimming events and the

triathlon swimming leg. So this was really essential, mission critical to the Paris Olympics from the very beginning. That sounds so incredibly risky though. I mean why make this a centerpiece of their bid if the Seine is so dirty? The way Paris organizers describe it, they want the signature of this Olympics to be audacity and there's really nothing more audacious that Paris could do than to clean up this river and send people into it and tell the world, hey, the city of Paris, so beautiful, so special, just got that much more special. Winning the bid to host the 2024 Games meant Paris now had a deadline for cleaning up the

river. The city brought together government bodies, engineers, and sanitation experts to figure out how to do it. And they came up with a $1.5 billion plan. I think because there has been this ambition to clean it up for such a long time, the Olympics became a really useful vehicle that frees up the funding, that frees up the political will

to go and spend a billion and a half dollars on what had been seen as a totally quixotic idea. How do you actually clean up such a dirty river? So there are two approaches. The first one is putting certain products in the sand that do contribute to reducing the unsafe levels of bacteria. But you know, that's, in a sense, almost like cleaning a fish tank, except on an enormous

scale. They also cleaned up the garbage and pulled out the bikes. And local officials went door to door to convince tens of thousands of homeowners to update their sewer systems. The other strategy, and that's the real key, is building this enormous underground reservoir to hold sewage, especially during periods of heavy rain,

and prevent it from going into the sand immediately. That mitigation actually makes a material difference, and it just buys the city and the river and the sewage system more time during those periods to then funnel it towards treatment plants. Several years ago, the city started building just that, a massive underground concrete basin to hold excess sewage. It was located under one of the city's main train stations. How monumental of a task was it to build something so huge underground and then reroute the sewer

system so that water flows into it? This was a years long task. And as one of the people in charge of building it put it to my colleague here in Paris, Paris is currently building two cathedrals. One above ground by repairing Notre Dame and one underground by building this reservoir. You have to imagine the scale of this thing. So far it has kept out the over the course of June and July, it's kept the equivalent of 22 Olympic swimming pools worth of sewage out of the Seine. I can't even...

22 Olympic swimming pools full of sewage is probably one of the most disgusting images I think that has been talked about on this show. Yeah, I hope you didn't just have lunch. It's surprising to me that just keeping raw sewage out of the Seine is enough to like get it clean. I would think that the river would have so much bacteria in it already that it wouldn't just keeping more of it out wouldn't be enough to get it clean enough to swim in. Well the Seine does have quite a strong current. It's 483 miles long. We often only think about the Parisian part,

but it runs all the way from Burgundy all the way to the sea in Normandy. So, you know, that water is moving. Well, which means there's also a lot of places for it to like get more pollution. Yeah, but none of those places are as dense as the four and a half million person city of Paris. So basically, just by keeping the sewage out, the water current that flows through means that like clean water will flow in and replace it basically.

Exactly, it allows the stretch of the sand that runs through Paris to renew itself a little bit and just gives it, basically gives it a breather. In April of this year, with only a few months until the Olympics, the deputy mayor of sports spoke with our colleagues inside the nearly completed basin. Here we are in the Basin de Stalitz, a specific place built for rain waters especially, to stop the water going into the river Seine.

The reservoir holds 13.2 million gallons. When the rain stops, it pumps excess wastewater back into the sewage system so that it doesn't go into the river. It's a 50,000-meter square of capacity. We will be able to manage the rain waters and keeping the best quality of water in the river sand. But once it was up and running, would it actually work? That's next. Introducing TD Insurance for Business with customized coverage options for your business. Because at TD Insurance, we understand that your business is unique, so your business insurance should be too.

Whether you're a shop owner, a pet groomer, a contractor, or a consultant, you can get customized coverage for your business. Contact a licensed TD insurance advisor to learn more. Earlier this month, the mayor of Paris declared that the Seine was safe enough to swim in, and she decided to prove it by taking a dip herself. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has been swimming in the Seine to prove it's safe. It's very cool, very, very nice, and it's amazing. It's amazing.

A dream. The water was tested, they reached an acceptable level, and the mayor actually had her swim. She wore a full wetsuit, and her only complaint was that the water was a little bit chilly. The reservoir was inaugurated in May, and for the most part, it worked. But not completely. While the reservoir is able to capture a lot of sewage, if it rains too much, it can't capture all of it. The question of how clean it is really changes day to day and depends heavily on the weather.

Even with the reservoir, heavy rain can make it unsafe for swimming. So that's one of the things that they're praying doesn't happen before the scheduled days in the Olympics when athletes are supposed to be in it. But Mayor Anne Hidalgo and the Paris 2024 people have insisted the whole time, this is going to work. Don't worry. And then last week on Friday, when the opening ceremony began… Great, rainy, but nonetheless spectacular.

The energy and excitement was visible with the team because they soaked in every moment. Soaked in a lot of rain. Athletes and the fans that came to cheer them on got soaked. Though we got totally drenched, but it was all worth it. As athletes paraded on the river, the new underground basin was put to the test. And as it rained, some sewage started overflowing into the river, exactly what the city had hoped to avoid. Did it really rain that much?

It rained heavily in patches quite close to the Games. I mean, you know, it's really the Friday and Saturday that were relentless, as everyone saw during the opening ceremony. This was bad news for the swimming events that had been planned for the Senn. On Sunday, organizers canceled practice swims because E. coli levels were too high, and officials crossed their fingers that the rain would stop and that the water would be clean enough by today when the triathlon was scheduled. So this is like coming down to the wire.

Yeah, they want to test as late as possible to make sure that it's safe and to have the closest possible idea of what the conditions are like in the SIN. The problem is that athletes went to bed Monday night not knowing whether they were going gonna swim or not on Tuesday. So what happened? So this morning at about four o'clock in the morning, the latest round of tests came in,

testing the quality of the water, and they decided it was not safe enough for the men's triathlon swim to happen in the Sen. So they decided to postpone, and this was just three, four hours before the competitors were supposed to be in the Seine. So they decided to postpone. And this was just three, four hours before the competitors were supposed to be in the water. They decided to postpone by a day, meaning that they'll now go off, in theory,

right after the women on Wednesday. But we're expecting a big storm on Tuesday night, so we could be facing another postponement. If the water isn't clean enough by Friday, the triathlon just won't have a swimming leg. And it'll become a duathlon with just biking and running. And the marathon swim will move to another location just outside the city. Is this reservoir not enough? Should it have been bigger? I think it's hard to say that, you know, a reservoir that can contain

20 Olympic pools worth of sewage isn't big enough. I mean, it sounds like they needed to do 40. 40 Olympic pools of sewage. But maybe if it had rained one more day at that point, then we'd be having this discussion saying should it have maybe been 50. So at this point, the triathlon has been delayed and it's still kind of up in the air as to whether or not this is going to happen.

Can we say yet at this point that this plan didn't work? I think they get a couple more bites at the cherry. If this goes off Wednesday, all will be forgiven and the athletes will have just wasted, gone to bed a little earlier one night when they didn't have to. If it goes off Friday, there will be three more days of negative headlines until then. If it doesn't happen at all, however, and they end up also doing the marathon swim in their B location, this will go down as one of the faux pas of the Parasol Olympics. You know, they promised the spectacular Zen cleanup and these amazing pictures of athletes

diving into this river in the heart of the city and then they didn't deliver. That's all for today, Tuesday, July 30th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Noemi Becerb and Eve Hartley. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.