Hacker News

Seine reopens to Paris swimmers after century-long ban

• 73 Comments
• I'm going to swim a 1000m race [0] there tomorrow morning! Wish me luck HN!
  [0] https://openswimstars.com/paris/

  By fouronnes3 7 hours ago

• Bonne chance!

  By darekkay 7 hours ago

• Удачи!

  By IgorPartola 5 hours ago

• [deleted]

  By 3 hours ago

• Good luck!

  By wartijn_ 7 hours ago

• One of the benefits of EU regulations is that they have brought some order to the dumping of raw sewage into rivers and seas. But there is still a lot of work to do.
  Local authorities from lots of EU regions generally avoid measuring water quality after rainy days because raw sewage is still often dumped under those conditions.
  Even in Basel, where the Rheine is really clean, authorities sometimes advise not to swim.

  By nextos 9 hours ago

• The uk escaped this madness, here a entrepeneur can still take a free market bath as god intended. https://www.sewagemap.co.uk/

  By ashoeafoot 5 hours ago

• Are there other options when it rains? I imagine they're not dumping sewage into rivers for fun.

  By thinkingtoilet 6 hours ago

• In DC, they're storing the combined runoff+sewage until it can be treated: https://dcist.com/story/23/09/18/new-anacostia-river-tunnel-...
  As expensive as this project is, separating the storm drains from the sewage lines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_sewer) in an existing system is much more costly.

  By ericvsmith 5 hours ago

• Portland, Oregon completed a project in 2011 that successfully eliminated almost all of the combined sewer overflows into the Willamette river and Columbia Slough (a swampy area on the south side of the Columbia river near the airport).
  There was a ton of work done to reduce the amount of water ending up in the sewer during storms followed by some large infrastructure improvements to improve the carrying capacity of the sewer itself.
  https://www.portland.gov/bes/about-big-pipe

  By zrail 4 hours ago

• Dedicated stormwater infrastructure separate from sewage pipes solves the problem. You can also build tanks to hold overflow.

  By joskvw 5 hours ago

• In London the Thames Tideway Tunnel is designed to intercept and divert sewage overflows from the River Thames, particularly during heavy rainfall:
  https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68464798
  I think there's a B1M episode on Youtube that has a good overview.

  By lsllc an hour ago

• Not mixing sewers and rainwater drains is the usual choice.

  By alexey-salmin 2 hours ago

• Pfft, raw sewage? Amateur hour.
  Back in my day we'd have river fires that burned 50' high and burn bridges.
  https://case.edu/ech/articles/c/cuyahoga-river-fire

  By ourmandave 2 hours ago

• The source of the Seine is in Burgundy. Not a European, so wondering what the relationship between the Seine and EU regulations is.

  By noughtme 7 hours ago

• An important part of the pollution in the Seine is from Paris itself. Due to being an old city, the sewer system and the flood water system (i.e rain) goes through mostly the same tubes and are dump directly in the Seine. This leads to the river being full of biological contaminent, a.k.a, shit.
  A lot of effort was done to remediate this very old issue, with a very big push before the Olympics games (but improvement to the sewage system has been going on for years).

  By maeln 7 hours ago

• The seine, burgundy and paris are all part of EU.

  By vasco 7 hours ago

• Turns out you can dump raw sewage in rivers at any point along them, not just the source.
  Also Burgundy is just another part of France which is in the EU, so not really sure what you mean.

  By p1necone 6 hours ago

• For anyone visiting Paris, the sewer museum is definitely a unique experience and worth a visit (although smelly). It gives you a grasp of what a monumental it was to build the sewers back then. You can also see the overflow reservoirs that dump water into the Seine when there is heavy rain (they were talking about the cleanup efforts leading to the Olympics when I was there some years ago).

  By cycomanic 8 hours ago

• I wonder what comes up when you search for "restaurants in your area" coming out of there. Or why someone actually would.

  By ourmandave 2 hours ago

• +1, I always recommend this. It's interesting, doesn't take very long, and well situated right in the middle of the tourism to get a little break from whatever the outside weather is.

  By sidibe 3 hours ago

• Commendable they’ve been able to remove the organic toxins, but I’m left wondering about PFAS, pesticides, microplastics etc?

  By saltysaltysalty 8 minutes ago

• > The seasonal opening of the Seine for swimming is seen as a key legacy of the Paris 2024 Olympics, when open-water swimmers and triathletes competed in its waters which were specially cleaned for the event.
  Meanwhile...
  > The Olympic legacy of the Seine has taken another hit, with a second athlete taken to hospital after competing in the murky waters.
  https://www.thetimes.com/sport/olympics/article/second-olymp...

  By jedimastert 10 hours ago

• It seems neither of them were clearly linked to the river? The articles on this guy were kinda clickbaity saying he "was rushed to the hospital" when he tweeted that he rushed to the hospital because of the stomach bug

  By yread 9 hours ago

• Since the reason for not swimming in the Seine was sewage, a "stomach bug" is exactly the problem you'd expect to develop after swimming in it. To rule the water out, you'd need evidence that, say, the guy ate at a restaurant with several other people who didn't go swimming, and they got sick too.

  By thaumasiotes 9 hours ago

• Why not just compare the incidence of sickness at the swimming event vs other triathlon swimming events and see if 2(or whatever the number of competitors affected was) is abnormal and work from there?

  By mym1990 7 hours ago

• Yep. That has, in fact, been done and seems to show an elevated risk of GI illness in Olympians who swam in the Seine compared to previous Olympics.
  https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/1116...

  By pdabbadabba 6 hours ago

• That would be an approach to the question of "is the Seine dirtier than other triathlon events?", but it wouldn't address the question of "how did this guy get sick?"

  By thaumasiotes 6 hours ago

• i cannot find current data, but france had more food poinoning case than the us about 20 years ago (that is not per capita, that is total) thus it something they ate is not unlikely

  By bluGill 2 hours ago

• Meanwhile:
  > Paris officials say they have taken several measures to ensure swimmers can safely enjoy the long-anticipated reopening, including daily water pollution testing and implementing a swim test for bathers. The water quality is "exceptional", said Marc Guillaume, the prefect for the Ile-de-France region that includes Paris. "We are monitoring two bacteria, E. coli and enterococci, and for one we are ten times below the thresholds and for the other more than 25 times below," he said.

  By layer8 9 hours ago

• let him swim in it. that's the real test. if the official claims it's exceptional then surely it's not a problem for him.

  By _zoltan_ 8 hours ago

• He did last year, alongside mayor Hidalgo and others, such as Tony Estanguet, who is a former athlete and was overseeing the olympics and the minister for sports.
  Article in French: https://www.franceinfo.fr/les-jeux-olympiques/paris-2024/bai...

  By padenot 7 hours ago

• Amusingly, President Macron also said that he was going to swim in it to prove it was safe, but ultimately didn't. According to Wikipedia, "the primary reason cited was the concurrent French general election, but reports also circulated that protestors had planned a mass defecation event to coincide with the swim."

  By ameliaquining 3 hours ago

• People living in houseboats along the river have been swimming in the Seine forever. And every summer, young people, possibly a little drunk, jump into the water as a dare from bridges near Notre-Dame.
  But yes, this is more mainstream and open to all so it's kind of big news.

  By bambax 9 hours ago

• > and every summer, young people, possibly a little drunk, jump into the water as a dare from bridges near Notre-Dame
  After ending high school exams in 1993, we jumped into the Seine from Pont de Neuilly. I suppose this sort of antics have been going on since times immemorial and without counting bacteria beforehand... But I'm glad the river has cleaned up !
  My first impression upon hitting the water: 1 - it is actually water (I expected mud !), 2 - wow, there is actually current and the shore goes by rather fast... No problems of any sort.
  Anyway, it is fun - do it, and have a spotter to check for ships !

  By liotier 4 hours ago

• I live on a houseboat just after paris in Meudon, facing Boulogne, we go paddle and swiming with the kids since they are 5 years old. The thing is to avoid going to the river the days after big rains. It is a very pleasant area along the Saint Germain Island (bras mort de l’Île Saint Germain)

  By wdavidw 7 hours ago

• when I was a kid, I swam in the Seine one day out of young stupidity and the next day I got hives on my skin and it was very itchy. I learned the lesson and luckily in a couple of days I was back to normal. Some of the people in my group(that swam with me) had longer lasting problems.

  By cladopa 6 hours ago

• The news is that it's now allowed / legal

  By forty 7 hours ago

• Just beware of the sharks
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Paris

  By david927 10 hours ago

• Bull sharks are known to swim 4000km inland (even 1100km in US).

  By dvh 9 hours ago

• I think you'll find that in the US they've been known to swim about 680 miles inland.

  By spauldo 6 hours ago

• 646374.4 Smoots
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot

  By nandomrumber 5 hours ago

• They don't have to swim that far to get to Cambridge, the only place in the US where they use Smoots.

  By spauldo 2 hours ago

• There are around 8 to 10 major dams or weirs between the ocean and Paris.

  By david927 8 hours ago

• Sharks only eat like once or twice a week and are very shy creatures, so not much to worry about. You're more likely to be killed by a coconut.

  By tmtvl 9 hours ago

• It was a joke about a silly movie premise

  By david927 8 hours ago

• That comment might also have been a joke, ironically and intentionally missing the point that perhaps there aren’t that many sharks in the Seine.

  By rossant 7 hours ago

• Or coconuts.

  By seszett 7 hours ago

• One could be carried there

  By kevinpet 6 hours ago

• Oh my.
  “Based on: An original idea”
  I suppose so…

  By alwa 10 hours ago

• it's entertainment, not science. if it fulfills that purpose then it's good. nothing else required.

  By _zoltan_ 8 hours ago

• I mean, you need some plausibility to the imaginative leap. It can be crazy but as long as it doesn't disturb the audience's suspension of disbelief, you're fine, and that's a strange line.
  There's nothing wrong with mocking the premise of this movie; I saw it and it deserves no defense.

  By david927 7 hours ago

• You know that river was bad if they closed it in 1925.

  By selimnairb 6 hours ago

• The water is "so clean" that you have mandatory showers before going in... But it's France, so how would you live without pointless regulations?

  By cm2187 9 hours ago

• Isn't a shower before swimming in a public pool a universal thing? It's always required in France.

  By seszett 7 hours ago

• I haven't been to a public pool in ages, but growing up in a small US town I can't say I remember any of the kids at the community center taking a shower before using the pool. It may be different now, but I would be disinclined to say a shower is universal at least based on my experience.

  By bigstrat2003 3 hours ago

• I also grew up in a small U.S. town, and the posted rules said you had to do this, but I don't think they were consistently followed or enforced.

  By ameliaquining 3 hours ago

• It’s pretty standard now.
  But not so much for hygiene standards (the chlorine takes care of that), but more for maintenance issues.
  Rinsing off before going in reduces the organic load in the pool, which reduces the amount of chlorine consumed, which reduces the amount of chemicals needed to maintain clean water (not to mention reduces chloramine levels which can irritate swimmers lungs).

  By refurb 2 hours ago

• I am staying at a north American hotel with a pool now, and I have noticed that absolutely nobody showers before (and they come with dry hair), despite the sign asking them to do so. I have been wondering if this is a cultural difference between Europe and America.
  It's absolutely disgusting.

  By Epa095 2 hours ago

• A swimming pool isn't a gigantic body of moving water that is already barely clean enough to be swimming in it in the first place.

  By cm2187 6 hours ago

• I thought running through the shower area between the changing room and the pool and trying to avoid the cold water as much as possible was the norm, but maybe it's different in France.

  By spauldo 6 hours ago

• Yes, but pools aren’t natural bodies of water that already don’t meet sanitary standards, not to mention the water is constantly moving so it’s not like the water is worse when someone goes in later.

  By refurb 2 hours ago

• People wear all sorts of oils and perfumes and deodorants that should be washed off before swimming.

  By jt2190 8 hours ago

• it's a river. Couple hundred people swimming in it with deodorants is meaningless.

  By _zoltan_ 8 hours ago

• I'd say it's the same rules as any other (swimmable) river in France, from the big to the small. Maybe it'd make more sense just for smaller rivers, but where do you draw the line? Like it's easier and simpler to just use the same set of rules

  By baud147258 7 hours ago

• Maybe that was the initial thought? It’s a river, a handful of homes emptying sewage there is meaningless. And centuries later, here we are.

  By loloquwowndueo 8 hours ago

• I was dubious so did a fact check, and it is indeed necessary! Not sure what the reasoning is, I wonder if it's some rule about public swimming which was originally created only for pools? Or maybe there are some wildlife concerns with certain lotions/etc getting in the water.
  > Y a-t-il des douches ? > > Oui ! Chaque site de baignade propose des douches – obligatoires avant d’aller se baigner –, un accès à des toilettes, un poste de secours ainsi que des espaces pour s’asseoir et profiter du soleil.
  https://www.paris.fr/pages/baignade-en-seine-toutes-les-ques...

  By cdrini 7 hours ago

• Maybe they're just erring on the side of caution since they just cleaned the place up.

  By ameliaquining 3 hours ago

• I won't be surprised if the shower drains back into the river.

  By alexey-salmin 2 hours ago

• I wonder if the water from those showers is drained directly in the river ?

  By rixed 2 hours ago