Why Cleaning the Seine will Fail

this is the sen it is the only River inside paris's ring and it cuts through the heart of the city it links the most important landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and nadam and it's also pretty disgusting on the 15th of May in the year 1990 the mayor of Paris and future president of France Jac Shak made a promise when Shak told Paris he would bathe in its most disgusting River it was banned from the public for almost 70 years but Shirak was a man who wanted to lead France and there weren't many political achievements like

getting French citizens to swim in front of the Eiffel Tower but shiak was also a man of empty promises 30 years after his TV announcement the river is still off limits 2023 marks 100 years that the S has been forbidden but now there's a new Parisian one who is promising the same as [Music] Shak with the announcement of the 2024 Olympics the mayor of Paris has promised that the sand will be cleaned paris's River will be swimmable for the first time in more than 100 years so how does she aim to clean paris's most disgusting

River why and at what cost I now have a second Channel called Fern for as long as I've been making videos I've also been wanting to work with a team a team that can produce videos faster trying to increase the standards of what is expected on YouTube and to also make videos for people who live in Europe but consume English content for a while this was just a dream but then I found the perfect people I heard that there were two German guys who lived in Amsterdam and made YouTube videos so I locked myself of

my grandparents basement and got to work I knew that Germans took their privacy seriously so I hired private investigators to scour the streets for anyone with a German accent and I spent days and nights researching my girlfriend left me and my grandma disowned me but it was worth it I found their house and knocked on their door and asked to start a YouTube channel together they were sweating a lot but they were down so we got to work we made videos on plane hijackings with no terrorists Puttin secret underground bunkers Rich Germans would found foundations

named after their Nazi parents and of course toilets you can watch all of those videos right now and a new one almost every week at youtube.com/ ferntv in 2017 Paris won the Olympic bid for 2024 different from all Olympics before it paris's opening ceremony will not take place in a stadium but instead it will take place in the San boats from each National delegation will carry hundreds of athletes across paris's River but what makes the 2024 Olympics even stranger are the plans to also use the river for two Olympic events the triathlon and Marathon swimming

this would have been Unthinkable only a decade ago but now something's different over the past couple of years paris's mayor has been busy in a city of around 600,000 parking spots she's ordered the removal of 70,000 of them in under 3 years she's closed off streets to cars reduce lanes and also speed limits she's poured Millions into adding hundreds of kilometers of bike lanes and in 2021 she adopted a € 250 million euro plan to transform the shandel from a car Centric Boulevard into an urban Forest her government has pushed through multiple plans for green

upgrades across the city they're an investment to make the city more pleasant but also safe to live in as temperatures rise but they also require capital and time so for Hildago the Olympics were the perfect opportunity to accelerate them and to also justify their costs and if there is one plan that hinges on the Olympics like no other it's our plan for the s for the past few years Paris has been undergoing a 1.4 billion Euro infrastructure plan to make its River swimmable the Olympic events held in the S will not just make good entertainment

but they're also a massive televised PR attempt to show the world it's clean enough to swim it would be a historic achievement a beautiful blue Jewel to top off the mayor's already green Crown in a city especially vulnerable to heat waves she would give the city a chance to cool off but to get her blue Jewel has been no cheap and easy task what people don't understand is that helo's most expensive plan is not her war on cars it's her war on a much more elusive hard to grab object human the basis of paris's sewer

system is the Ovid pipe instead of pumps the city sewer relies purely on Gravity by harnessing the natural incline of the sen River Basin the ovoid shape of the pipe concentrates water flow and a slope of around 3 cm per meter ensures a steady flow of debris while making it possible for maintenance staff to walk around waste water funnels from a much denser network of smaller ooid pipes into a handful of much larger collector sewers these collector sewers line the S and they direct sewage to Wastewater plants Downstream of the city for its time paris's

sewer was an intellectual Marvel but today it has an old problem the sewer is a combined one it mixes storm water and water together modern sewage systems on the other hand are usually built with separate drains for both and the reason for doing this is simple if you combine storm water and water and suddenly you have a lot of storm water there's a risk that the entire sewer can flood if that happens it can cause mixed storm water to go back to where it came from paris's sewer system wasn't entirely unprepared for this though and

its large collector sewers are intentionally built without outfall pipes in the case of a flood these pipes direct waste water into an emergency location one small problem though is that in paris's sewer the emergency location is the sand today 44 outfall pipes direct waste water into the river around 12 times a year only last year about 1.9 million cubic M of untreated Wastewater went into the river if Hildago wants the sent to be cleaned she needs to change paris's sewer system so over the last few years her government has attempted just that and Paris has

been constructing a very big tank and tunnel the tunnel is around 700 M long and connects the current sewer system to the cylinder tank which is around 50 m wide and 34 M deep at full capacity this tank will hold around 45,000 cubic M of storm water and it's roughly the size of 20 Olympic swimming pools the aim is for the tank and tunnel to fill up with storm water before paris's entire sewer system does eventually releasing the water slowly back into the sewer system without overflowing it the tank and tunnel are expected to bring

the flooding from around 12 times a year to three from 1.9 million cubic M of waste water annually to 100,000 clearly this won't be a perfect modification in cases of extreme rain the river should still be avoided for some days the tank and tunnel are not large enough to bring flooding to a guaranteed zero but even if it did the city still has other water sources it needs to tackle as well docked on the river are around7 home boats that dump their into the sen daily in 2018 the city mandated that these boats needed to

be connected to the Sewer but the people on board weren't on board the Boat Owners felt that the cost for fitting their ships to the Sewer outweighed the benefits but on the other hand maybe just don't in a public River the only difference between boat owners and a person who stands on the side of the river and takes a directly into it are a few walls in a door along with the home boats the city is also trying to convince 23 ,000 homeowners on land to also connect with the current sewer system but here there

are also problems like the house boats some homeowners simply do not want to connect to the sewer system either by July of 2023 only 25% of homeowners have been connected even with the government offering €6,000 to each household to help cover the costs the construction of a giant tank and tunnel were in some ways a lot more straightforward than connecting a bunch of individual homes as a final measure the city has also been upgrading Wastewater plants Upstream of the City by adding small amounts of performic acid to the Wastewater the levels of harmful fecal bacteria

can be cut by 100 times alone each of these measures are a far cry from perfect but together they can be enough by 2025 the city is on track to open up three pools in the sand each with their own lifeguards changing rooms and demarcated swimming areas these pools can be found within the ring and are named things I couldn't be bothered to pronounce for this video the city is also considering more than 20 other sites that can also be converted into swimming areas in the future now whether hild doggo's plans will succeed is not

going to be determined by YouTubers or pundits it will be determined by time will Paris turn into a green Cream City and Al Dogo celebrated as a leader who got it right or will it be underwhelming a lot of money for things that looked much cooler in 3D renders than they do in reality I don't know but what I do know is that France has been at the Forefront of sustainability for a while now for example they forc McDonald's to use reusable dish wear requiring expensive design teams to make very unique reusable designs that reduce

the use of single-use plastic the story is fascinating and you can watch the video on it right now on Fern using the link on screen