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Cleaning up the Poop-Polluted Seine for the Paris Olympics

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Friday, July 19, 2024

Rachel Feltman: One week from today the 2024 Olympics in Paris will begin with a parade—not in a stadium but on a river. Thousands of athletes from more than 200 territories will float on boats down the Seine. City officials and event organizers have placed a big bet on this beloved river: that the infamously polluted waters will be safe for Olympic swimmers to compete in.But their efforts have been met with—well, we’ll say skepticism, to say the least. Back in June, when the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, was set to swim in the Seine to show her confidence in the cleanup efforts, a trending hashtag encouraged folks to poop in the river in—protest? Unclear. Hidalgo did successfully take a dip this past Wednesday and gave the experience rave reviews.[CLIP: Cheering and clapping]On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Feltman: But that doesn’t mean the Olympic events will go quite as swimmingly. You know what they say about stepping into the same river twice: those things are always changing and always flowing. And the Seine’s bacterial levels are still fluctuating from day to day.For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Today I’m joined by associate news editor Allison Parshall, who investigated this high-profile cleanup attempt for us.So, Allison tell me: Are Olympians going to swim in the river or not?Allison Parshall: I would love to be able to tell you—I would peer into my crystal ball—but I think until there are bodies in the water, I’m not going to be able to say one way or the other [laughs]. And that’s mostly because they’ve basically done all that they can at this point from the perspective of, you know, cleaning up the river. The main problem right now is bacteria, and some of the things that could cause bacteria levels to be higher are kind of just at the whims of the weather: It’s if it’s too rainy, bacteria counts can be too high. If it’s not sunny enough, because sun can kill the bacteria—the bacteria counts can be too high.So throughout June, basically, the bacteria counts were much higher than, I think, anyone expected or wanted. And that’s because the—Western Europe, in general, had an unseasonably wet summer, at least in the beginning.So basically, after a very wet June, the organizers, who had been very proudly saying, “There is no backup plan. We’re all in on this end. There is no backup plan. There’s no plan B,” announced a backup plan.So the backup plan for the marathon swimming events, at least, which is one of the ones that would be in the Seine, is this nautical stadium outside of the city. It’s this very fancy facility inaugurated in 2019. It’s already hosting the Olympic and Paralympic canoe, kayak and rowing events, so there’s that.Feltman: Yeah, well, it’s good that they have that backup.From above, this facility definitely looks like that kind of freaky ocean arena from The Hunger Games, but ...Parshall: Hate it.Feltman: [Laughs] I’m, I’m sure it’s lovely, though. I’m sure it’s a lovely place to be and definitely better than a river full of poop, in any case.Parshall: It’s probably hard not to be better than a river full of poop.Feltman: [Laughs]Parshall: But basically this nautical stadium, it’s already hosting those boating events, but the triathlon wouldn’t be able to be relocated there—so that’s the other event that would be swimming in the Seine. So that they would just have to postpone that and hope the bacteria levels go down. Or if they don’t, it could just get downgraded from a triathlon to a duathlon, which I feel like is a different sport.Feltman: Yeah, I think if I had trained for years to specifically be in the triathlon in the Olympics, and swimming got cut, and that was, like, my main strength, I’d be pretty ticked off. It makes you wonder why Paris, like, took such a chance on the Seine in the first place.Parshall: This river is such an important part of their city’s history and culture, and they’ve been trying to clean it for a long time, and so it might be one of the only cities right now where we’re seeing them place such a big bet in the international spotlight on being able to clean this up, especially when it’s kind of at the whims of the weather.But they’re definitely not the only city facing this problem with its urban waterways. Industrialized cities across the world are reaching this kind of new phase of their river cleanup, at least for these rivers that were once so polluted by industry. And it’s possible that after, you know, decades, centuries of being very unsightly waste dumps, we might get to swim in a lot of urban waterways again.So I’ve got kind of, like, a personal touchstone with this. I grew up in Ohio. My Seine, as I like to say, was the Cuyahoga River ...Feltman: Oh, wow.Parshall: Have you heard of the Cuyahoga River?Feltman: I have in the context of it being, like, a river so gross that it inspired us to create the Environmental Protection Agency [laughs], which is ...Parshall: [Laughs] Yeah, when I was a kid ...Feltman: Such a legacy.Parshall: When I was a kid it was just, like, the place that we would go as a family on the weekends. We would walk and bike the towpath, and then there was this farmers’ market where we would get ice cream and corn on the cob; it was very Ohio. But I didn’t realize until I grew up that most of the people like you that knew of the Cuyahoga knew of it because they’d seen pictures of it on fire—like, the surface of the river burning, or at least ...Feltman: Yeah, yeah.Parshall: The industrial waste ...Feltman: It’s striking [laughs].Parshall: Yeah, yeah—that picture in particular. There’s this one particular photo, and it shows these firefighters spewing water onto the surface of the river to, you know, try to put out the fire, and it looks so preposterous because a river’s not supposed to be on fire.So when I picture these urban waterways that have just been so polluted but have since been relatively cleaned up, I picture this infamous image of the Cuyahoga on fire and then what I know it as today, which is kind of a muddy, lazy river but definitely not on fire.And I actually talked to a hydrologist about this—her name’s Anne Jefferson. She researches urban waterways at the University of Vermont, but she spent 10 years of her career at Kent State University, studying the nearby Cuyahoga.Anne Jefferson: The Cuyahoga River didn’t just catch fire once; it caught fire [a] dozen-plus times. It was oil. It was paint byproducts. It was all sorts of industrial byproducts. It—also sewage—the sewage is not the part that’s gonna catch fire, but it’s, you know, if you fell into the Cuyahoga, or if you fell into the Thames in London, the advice was that you take yourself to the hospital immediately.Parshall: I can’t say that I really want to swim in the Cuyahoga River, even these days—like, it generally looks pretty muddy—but it’s no longer a flaming health hazard, so there’s that. And its misfortunes really helped galvanize support for new regulation: that’s the Clean Water Act of ’72.Paris’s river may not have caught fire, but it kind of has a similar story, as do many other urban rivers. After the industrial revolution they just become this dumping ground that carries all of our waste, both of our bodies and of our factories, out and away from cities. And in Paris, this killed what was a really important part of the city’s culture at the time, which is bathing in the Seine.Feltman: That’s so wild. Like, I, I can know intellectually that before cities were super polluted, their rivers were nice places to be, but I still have trouble picturing people, like, you know, bathing in the Seine.Parshall: Yeah, I don’t know that this was all—the case with every industrialized city, but it was definitely the case with Paris. I mean, a lot of cities, you know, they kind of grew up around the industrial revolution. But with Paris there are several very famous paintings by Monet, Renoir, Seurat that depict these riverside scenes, and there’s these famous floating bathhouses that were filled with untreated water from the city—like, basically barges.And swimming in the river was largely banned in 1867. But that was just in the city, and then in the suburbs it was banned in 1923, but some people kept swimming in it. Like, Paris did hold the 1900 Olympics swimming events in the Seine. So this would be—if they do swim, it’ll be upholding this 124-year-old tradition. But by the 1960s the river was just well and truly disgusting, and it had been declared biologically dead.Feltman: I mean, first of all, continuing to swim in it—extremely French. Second of all, what does it, what does it actually mean for a river to be biologically dead?Parshall: Yeah, I asked Anne Jefferson that question because I also had never found a definition. She has never found a definition, so it might be kind of, like, an advocacy phrase.Feltman: A vibe.Parshall: People say it a lot—a vibe. It—basically it means, roughly, there’s no fish, or there’s no “desirable species,” quote, unquote ...Feltman: Fair enough.Parshall: But the bacteria, as undesirable as they may be—or some of them, at least—those were thriving, definitely, in the 1960s. And later—in ’85, I think, was the low point—it was measured—the Seine was measured to have 500,000 colony-forming units of E. coli per 100 milliliters of water. That’s, like, 500 times the current European standard for bathing.Yeah, we’re—I mean, I’m picturing sludge. I imagine it would not be sludge—like, it would still be water consistency—but I’m just picturing a lot of bacteria. But I have to say, the Cuyahoga, during a dry summer around the same time, I think in, like, ’82, the E. coli counts ranged up to 2 million. So not that it’s a competition, but I think we won—or lost.And I mean, it was only a few years later—so in 1988—that the mayor of Paris at the time, Jacques Chirac, he promised to swim in the Seine within three years’ time. Would you like to guess if he kept the promise?Feltman: [Laughs] I’m gonna guess he did not do that [laughs].Parshall: That is correct. He did not do that.Feltman: That just makes me think of the Mary-Kate and Ashley movie Passport to Paris. Do you remember the scene where they’re visiting their, I think, grandfather is, like, the French ambassador or something, and he’s trying to get the French to accept this, like, clean water proposal, and they’re like, “No! We don’t need your stinky, American, clean water.”Parshall: “No!”Feltman: Yeah. And then they surprise the, I guess, president or prime minister at a dinner party with a glass of tap water that’s untreated, and it’s like—it looks like chocolate milk. It’s, like, so disgusting. And I’m sure they took a lot of liberties with crafting the, the untreated Parisian water. But it was a real—I think I saw a TikTok recently that was like, “This full-on Erin Brockovich moment from Mary-Kate and Ashley.” Very formative for me [laughs].Parshall: I somehow missed this movie, but I think I absolutely would have loved it. And, like, I guess to be clear, the French government is not saying that the river needs to be clean enough to drink. That would be a whole other thing entirely.But the, the river is definitely in a better shape now than it was when, you know, Jacques Chirac promised to swim in it. Last summer, actually, the part where the Olympic races are supposed to start from, of the Seine, it was swimmable seven days out of 10, on average, so it’s not that bad. Like, like, people are making it sound like it’s literally, like, a flaming—you know, like the Cuyahoga or something. But in reality it, it’s more variable than that. And the fact that it’s possible at all for any, you know, somewhat safe swimming in rivers like the Seine right now is because of those regulations like the one from Mary-Kate and Ashley movie Passport to Paris or whatever. It’s because of those regulations that targeted the obvious and easy places where waste was being dumped into our water—so like the pipes just dumping industrial waste straight into the water. That’s what Jefferson called the “low-hanging fruit.”Jefferson: So once you’ve taken care of, like, the paint and the oil and stuff going into the river from the factories, what you’re left with is this harder problem that we call nonpoint source pollution. It’s the pollution that’s coming from a million different little places, right?In the air it’s the stuff coming out of the tailpipes of our cars. For water it’s stormwater runoff: it’s all the water coming off the rooftops and pavements, being carried by thousands of pipes, coming into every small stream, every river, you know, from every neighborhood.Parshall: So that stormwater that’s coming from all those pipes, it’s a problem because it’s carrying things like fertilizer, pesticides, bacteria—basically all sorts of stuff that you just don’t want in the water. And even worse, in many cities like Paris—also kind of, like, 60 percent of New York—when it enters stormwater drains, it gets funneled into the same pipes that carry the raw sewage to our wastewater plants, and when it rains too much, you get a bit of a backup.Jefferson: In order to keep this sewage-stormwater mix from backing up into people’s houses, you have what are called combined sewer overflows, so sort of like the safety pressure release valves on the system where now water is being diverted out of the sewage network and directly into streams, rivers and lakes. And this was one of those “it seemed like a good idea at the time” legacies that constrain what we do now.Parshall: And the reason it’s so constraining is because it’s so expensive to fix. Basically what you’d have to do is dig up all of those combined pipes and replace them with two sets: one for sewage, one for stormwater. And some cities like Minneapolis have tried to do that, but probably the more common option is to just find somewhere to store all of that mixed sewer-stormwater stuff until the treatment plant is ready to take care of it, so I reached out to Bruno Pigott, the acting assistant administrator for water at the EPA, and he mentioned some ways that cities are going about doing this.Bruno Pigott: In Indianapolis, for example, they put in a 28-mile tunnel [system] underground that captures all this combined sewage before it gets to a water body, stores it and then sends it to a wastewater treatment plant for cleanup.Parshall: So he actually told me a bit about this time that he got to visit the site of that project. He was working for the state of Indiana at the time, in, like, the 2010s. And this project is still under construction—and it cost $2 billion.Feltman: Wow.Pigott: I went down as they were building the tunnel and went into it—so the sewage that eventually will be in that tunnel was not, luckily, there when I was in it. But it looks very much like a tunnel that you would see in a subway. I mean, it’s that big. It’s tremendously large. You could drive a truck down this tunnel. It is, it’s so deep that it stores millions of gallons of sewage so that the treatment plants can actually treat it and send it out in a clean form back to the river.Parshall: So that’s not too different from Paris’ main solution ahead of the Olympic Games. They also just built this very big basin to hold all of that raw sewage-stormwater mix.Feltman: Oh, yeah ...Parshall: Yeah.Feltman: “The shove it all under the bed” method—tried and true [laughs].Parshall: [Laughs] Well, it’s more like “shove it under the bed, and then take a little bit out of it every day for the next few months until you can finally take care of it all” ...Feltman: Oh, great ...Parshall: So, yeah, yeah ...Feltman: That’s actually really nice.Parshall: So it’s not like—it’s not gonna sit in there forever. It’s actually kind of the logical solution because the whole problem in the first place is just the system does not have enough capacity to deal with all of this water. Their backup plan is dump it in rivers, which is not all that logical—it’s just, like Anne Jefferson said, seemed like a good idea at the time.This is probably just as logical of a solution, besides, you know, replacing all the pipes or scaling up the wastewater treatment’s capacity. But basically this basin, even though it sounds like it would be maybe the cheaper option, is still pretty expensive: they spent €90 million on it; that’s about $97 million. And that reservoir holds 50,000 cubic meters of liquid, so that is 20 Olympic-size swimming pools’ worth of raw sewage mélange that might otherwise get dumped into the river for the actual Olympic swimmers.Feltman: Incredible.Parshall: So that basin was completed in May, and bacteria levels in the water, which is the main concern for the swimming events, were still measuring too high throughout June, and that’s partially just because it’s been so unseasonably rainy, causing a lot more of those combined sewer overflows.For what it’s worth, the Olympics president said that he remains confident that the weather will be fine and the river will be fine come the end of July, so, you know, there’s that. But I did get to speak with someone who actually had the opportunity to swim in the Seine. Her name is Sibylle van der Walt. She’s the president of a clean water advocacy organization based in France.Sibylle van der Walt: It does mean a little bit of courage to, to, to swim in the Seine, firstly because the water is dark. It’s, it’s not transparent, and that is not a good sign.Feltman: How murky are we talking about here?Parshall: She told me that she couldn’t see much further down than about a foot [roughly 0.3 meters], so most of her body was totally obscured by the water.Feltman: Ugh, that’s—yeah, ew [laughs].Van der Walt: But it didn’t smell bad, that I can say, and I didn’t have a problem afterwards, so I was perhaps just lucky, and first you think, “Oh, what is—what am I doing here?” and so, but then you get used to it, and then it was actually very pleasant. It’s, it’s fun.Parshall: So Van der Walt got involved in the movement for swimmable urban rivers when she moved to France after living in Germany and Switzerland, and those are two countries where swimming in rivers is far more common.Van der Walt: I used to work at the University of Bern, where you have a river called Aare, and there even the president of the parliament goes for a swim during the lunch break, and it’s really, like, everyone walks around in a swimming costume and walks up the river, jumps in and comes back.Parshall: Apparently some people in Bern actually use the river to commute one way to work during the summers ...Feltman: What?Parshall: Like, they, like, pack up their belongings in floating, waterproof bags and just go for a dip, and I guess just coast home.Feltman: Oh, my gosh, I—so I assumed you meant, like, boating, but, no, we’re talking about people swimming ...Parshall: No, yeah—in the water.Feltman: Briefcase bobbing along behind them—incredible [laughs].Parshall: [Laughs] I literally did not believe this. I thought that it was one of those Internet stories, made up, and it doesn’t seem like this is something that people do really often, but I did email the Swiss Lifesaving Society—it’s a lifeguard association—to confirm because it sounded so far-fetched, and they warned me that the current in the river that goes through Bern is no joke, and they actually don’t recommend swimming in it right now, but some people appear to actually do this. And this kind of river-swimming culture seems like a total dream to me, that’s something totally unattainable in Paris and definitely in New York City, where we both live, and ...Feltman: Yeah.Parshall: Like, sure, these rivers are no longer full of stinky industrial waste, and cities are turning back toward them by building waterfront parks and business districts, but swimming in them? It feels harder ...Feltman: Yeah, yeah, a river doesn’t have to be on fire for me to not wanna swim in it. There’s, there’s a spectrum, really, from “on fire” to, to “swimmable,” and I don’t really feel like the Hudson is there yet.Parshall: Yeah, apparently they do the triathlon in—the New York City Triathlon—the swimming part is in the Hudson, so, you know, I’m not tempted to do that.Feltman: [Laughs] Yeah, I think I briefly, in, like, a moment of complete delusion a few years ago, I was like, “Maybe I’m gonna try to get into triathlons.” And I honestly don’t remember if the part about the triathlon being in the Hudson River was, like, a selling point to me, or if that was the moment when I was like, “Wait, I’ve suddenly remembered I absolutely don’t want to do a triathlon under any circumstances.”Parshall: I mean, I did go to the beach for the first time since moving to New York last weekend, and I was shocked at how pleasant it was. I think I forgot how much it’s enjoyable ...Feltman: Oh, yeah.Parshall: To swim in, like, natural waters.I mean, they’re installing a pool in the East River now in New York. They call it a, quote, “giant strainer” dropped into the river. So relatively soon you should be able to do that.Feltman: Yeah, I remember when the renderings for that first went around, and I, like, I would totally do it, but I kind of feel like tourists and, like, wannabe influencers are gonna make it terrible even if there isn’t tons of pathogenic bacteria in it. So, yeah, fingers crossed, but I, I have to say, I’m not optimistic.So, yeah, I’m getting the impression that, like, unless a city makes a big effort to make swimming safe, and that that’s been confirmed by outside testing, like, you probably don’t want to go do laps in an urban river. Would you say that’s true?Parshall: I don’t know if it totally needs a big effort in every city—some of them are just not as bad. Like, Sibylle Van der Walt told me about a couple cities in France where the quality is kind of fine already.But basically, if you’re looking at swimming in pretty much any urban waterway, you’re gonna wanna take precautions. And that includes checking the recent bacterial accounts for the water, if that information is available—a lot of cities do make it available. And just, when in doubt, do not swim after heavy rains, especially if the city has combined sewer and stormwater systems.Feltman: Sure, makes sense.Parshall: Yeah, also—whether or not the Olympians are actually able to swim in the Seine, at this point, you know, it’s a little bit of an act of God, but Paris’ mayor, Anne Hidalgo, and other Siene cleanup proponents, they really emphasize that this project will benefit Parisians beyond the Olympics, regardless of whether or not the Olympians are able to swim.So the government of Paris has said that there will be three public swimming sites that will be open for the summer of 2025. That’s next summer.Feltman: Yeah, no, that’s a really good point. And, you know, so much Olympics infrastructure, like, ends up not being useful to cities, you know, kind of infamously, after the fact, but it’s true that a clean, swimmable river is something that is gonna be really impactful.Parshall: Yeah, there’s a lot of kind of schadenfreude surrounding this whole situation, I think, just because the Olympics can be so fraught: There’s so much money involved. There’s livelihoods involved. There’s—France is in the midst of a difficult political time. It makes sense that people are so—have so—focused in on this as kind of a, a symbol of the success of the Olympics.But putting all of that aside, it, it seems like an uncomplicated good to me to be able to say, “Hey, this river is swimmable now,” or at least it’s a lot closer to swimmable, or even if it isn’t swimmable, there is, you know, 50 Olympic swimming pool worth of raw sewage that is, in the worst-case scenario …Feltman: No longer in the river.Parshall: Not being dumped into the river.I think, you know, if, if the Olympics has to be the excuse for them to spend €90 million on it—which, again, like, in comparison, Indianapolis spent $2 billion—so it, it can be, it can be a really fraught topic, but at the same time, hey, clean water—seems like a good thing.Feltman: [Laughs] It’s true. We all love our water to not be full of poop.So, listeners, what’s your take: Would you go swimming in the Seine? Let us know at ScienceQuickly@sciam.com. While you’re there, feel free to share any feedback you have for us or any suggestions you have for topics we should cover. And if you have a second, it would also be great if you could give us a quick rating and review wherever you are listening to this podcast right now.Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was reported and co-hosted by Allison Parshall. Madison Goldberg and Anaissa Ruiz Tejada edit our show, with fact-checking from Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.For Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend!

The Seine will be the stage for the Paris 2024 Olympics’ Opening Ceremony—and for its marathon swimming events. But this urban waterway is challenging to keep clean.

Rachel Feltman: One week from today the 2024 Olympics in Paris will begin with a parade—not in a stadium but on a river. Thousands of athletes from more than 200 territories will float on boats down the Seine. City officials and event organizers have placed a big bet on this beloved river: that the infamously polluted waters will be safe for Olympic swimmers to compete in.

But their efforts have been met with—well, we’ll say skepticism, to say the least. Back in June, when the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, was set to swim in the Seine to show her confidence in the cleanup efforts, a trending hashtag encouraged folks to poop in the river in—protest? Unclear. Hidalgo did successfully take a dip this past Wednesday and gave the experience rave reviews.

[CLIP: Cheering and clapping]


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Feltman: But that doesn’t mean the Olympic events will go quite as swimmingly. You know what they say about stepping into the same river twice: those things are always changing and always flowing. And the Seine’s bacterial levels are still fluctuating from day to day.

For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Today I’m joined by associate news editor Allison Parshall, who investigated this high-profile cleanup attempt for us.

So, Allison tell me: Are Olympians going to swim in the river or not?

Allison Parshall: I would love to be able to tell you—I would peer into my crystal ball—but I think until there are bodies in the water, I’m not going to be able to say one way or the other [laughs]. And that’s mostly because they’ve basically done all that they can at this point from the perspective of, you know, cleaning up the river. The main problem right now is bacteria, and some of the things that could cause bacteria levels to be higher are kind of just at the whims of the weather: It’s if it’s too rainy, bacteria counts can be too high. If it’s not sunny enough, because sun can kill the bacteria—the bacteria counts can be too high.

So throughout June, basically, the bacteria counts were much higher than, I think, anyone expected or wanted. And that’s because the—Western Europe, in general, had an unseasonably wet summer, at least in the beginning.

So basically, after a very wet June, the organizers, who had been very proudly saying, “There is no backup plan. We’re all in on this end. There is no backup plan. There’s no plan B,” announced a backup plan.

So the backup plan for the marathon swimming events, at least, which is one of the ones that would be in the Seine, is this nautical stadium outside of the city. It’s this very fancy facility inaugurated in 2019. It’s already hosting the Olympic and Paralympic canoe, kayak and rowing events, so there’s that.

Feltman: Yeah, well, it’s good that they have that backup.

From above, this facility definitely looks like that kind of freaky ocean arena from The Hunger Games, but ...

Parshall: Hate it.

Feltman: [Laughs] I’m, I’m sure it’s lovely, though. I’m sure it’s a lovely place to be and definitely better than a river full of poop, in any case.

Parshall: It’s probably hard not to be better than a river full of poop.

Feltman: [Laughs]

Parshall: But basically this nautical stadium, it’s already hosting those boating events, but the triathlon wouldn’t be able to be relocated there—so that’s the other event that would be swimming in the Seine. So that they would just have to postpone that and hope the bacteria levels go down. Or if they don’t, it could just get downgraded from a triathlon to a duathlon, which I feel like is a different sport.

Feltman: Yeah, I think if I had trained for years to specifically be in the triathlon in the Olympics, and swimming got cut, and that was, like, my main strength, I’d be pretty ticked off. It makes you wonder why Paris, like, took such a chance on the Seine in the first place.

Parshall: This river is such an important part of their city’s history and culture, and they’ve been trying to clean it for a long time, and so it might be one of the only cities right now where we’re seeing them place such a big bet in the international spotlight on being able to clean this up, especially when it’s kind of at the whims of the weather.

But they’re definitely not the only city facing this problem with its urban waterways. Industrialized cities across the world are reaching this kind of new phase of their river cleanup, at least for these rivers that were once so polluted by industry. And it’s possible that after, you know, decades, centuries of being very unsightly waste dumps, we might get to swim in a lot of urban waterways again.

So I’ve got kind of, like, a personal touchstone with this. I grew up in Ohio. My Seine, as I like to say, was the Cuyahoga River ...

Feltman: Oh, wow.

Parshall: Have you heard of the Cuyahoga River?

Feltman: I have in the context of it being, like, a river so gross that it inspired us to create the Environmental Protection Agency [laughs], which is ...

Parshall: [Laughs] Yeah, when I was a kid ...

Feltman: Such a legacy.

Parshall: When I was a kid it was just, like, the place that we would go as a family on the weekends. We would walk and bike the towpath, and then there was this farmers’ market where we would get ice cream and corn on the cob; it was very Ohio. But I didn’t realize until I grew up that most of the people like you that knew of the Cuyahoga knew of it because they’d seen pictures of it on fire—like, the surface of the river burning, or at least ...

Feltman: Yeah, yeah.

Parshall: The industrial waste ...

Feltman: It’s striking [laughs].

Parshall: Yeah, yeah—that picture in particular. There’s this one particular photo, and it shows these firefighters spewing water onto the surface of the river to, you know, try to put out the fire, and it looks so preposterous because a river’s not supposed to be on fire.

So when I picture these urban waterways that have just been so polluted but have since been relatively cleaned up, I picture this infamous image of the Cuyahoga on fire and then what I know it as today, which is kind of a muddy, lazy river but definitely not on fire.

And I actually talked to a hydrologist about this—her name’s Anne Jefferson. She researches urban waterways at the University of Vermont, but she spent 10 years of her career at Kent State University, studying the nearby Cuyahoga.

Anne Jefferson: The Cuyahoga River didn’t just catch fire once; it caught fire [a] dozen-plus times. It was oil. It was paint byproducts. It was all sorts of industrial byproducts. It—also sewage—the sewage is not the part that’s gonna catch fire, but it’s, you know, if you fell into the Cuyahoga, or if you fell into the Thames in London, the advice was that you take yourself to the hospital immediately.

Parshall: I can’t say that I really want to swim in the Cuyahoga River, even these days—like, it generally looks pretty muddy—but it’s no longer a flaming health hazard, so there’s that. And its misfortunes really helped galvanize support for new regulation: that’s the Clean Water Act of ’72.

Paris’s river may not have caught fire, but it kind of has a similar story, as do many other urban rivers. After the industrial revolution they just become this dumping ground that carries all of our waste, both of our bodies and of our factories, out and away from cities. And in Paris, this killed what was a really important part of the city’s culture at the time, which is bathing in the Seine.

Feltman: That’s so wild. Like, I, I can know intellectually that before cities were super polluted, their rivers were nice places to be, but I still have trouble picturing people, like, you know, bathing in the Seine.

Parshall: Yeah, I don’t know that this was all—the case with every industrialized city, but it was definitely the case with Paris. I mean, a lot of cities, you know, they kind of grew up around the industrial revolution. But with Paris there are several very famous paintings by Monet, Renoir, Seurat that depict these riverside scenes, and there’s these famous floating bathhouses that were filled with untreated water from the city—like, basically barges.

And swimming in the river was largely banned in 1867. But that was just in the city, and then in the suburbs it was banned in 1923, but some people kept swimming in it. Like, Paris did hold the 1900 Olympics swimming events in the Seine. So this would be—if they do swim, it’ll be upholding this 124-year-old tradition. But by the 1960s the river was just well and truly disgusting, and it had been declared biologically dead.

Feltman: I mean, first of all, continuing to swim in it—extremely French. Second of all, what does it, what does it actually mean for a river to be biologically dead?

Parshall: Yeah, I asked Anne Jefferson that question because I also had never found a definition. She has never found a definition, so it might be kind of, like, an advocacy phrase.

Feltman: A vibe.

Parshall: People say it a lot—a vibe. It—basically it means, roughly, there’s no fish, or there’s no “desirable species,” quote, unquote ...

Feltman: Fair enough.

Parshall: But the bacteria, as undesirable as they may be—or some of them, at least—those were thriving, definitely, in the 1960s. And later—in ’85, I think, was the low point—it was measured—the Seine was measured to have 500,000 colony-forming units of E. coli per 100 milliliters of water. That’s, like, 500 times the current European standard for bathing.

Yeah, we’re—I mean, I’m picturing sludge. I imagine it would not be sludge—like, it would still be water consistency—but I’m just picturing a lot of bacteria. But I have to say, the Cuyahoga, during a dry summer around the same time, I think in, like, ’82, the E. coli counts ranged up to 2 million. So not that it’s a competition, but I think we won—or lost.

And I mean, it was only a few years later—so in 1988—that the mayor of Paris at the time, Jacques Chirac, he promised to swim in the Seine within three years’ time. Would you like to guess if he kept the promise?

Feltman: [Laughs] I’m gonna guess he did not do that [laughs].

Parshall: That is correct. He did not do that.

Feltman: That just makes me think of the Mary-Kate and Ashley movie Passport to Paris. Do you remember the scene where they’re visiting their, I think, grandfather is, like, the French ambassador or something, and he’s trying to get the French to accept this, like, clean water proposal, and they’re like, “No! We don’t need your stinky, American, clean water.”

Parshall: “No!”

Feltman: Yeah. And then they surprise the, I guess, president or prime minister at a dinner party with a glass of tap water that’s untreated, and it’s like—it looks like chocolate milk. It’s, like, so disgusting. And I’m sure they took a lot of liberties with crafting the, the untreated Parisian water. But it was a real—I think I saw a TikTok recently that was like, “This full-on Erin Brockovich moment from Mary-Kate and Ashley.” Very formative for me [laughs].

Parshall: I somehow missed this movie, but I think I absolutely would have loved it. And, like, I guess to be clear, the French government is not saying that the river needs to be clean enough to drink. That would be a whole other thing entirely.

But the, the river is definitely in a better shape now than it was when, you know, Jacques Chirac promised to swim in it. Last summer, actually, the part where the Olympic races are supposed to start from, of the Seine, it was swimmable seven days out of 10, on average, so it’s not that bad. Like, like, people are making it sound like it’s literally, like, a flaming—you know, like the Cuyahoga or something. But in reality it, it’s more variable than that. And the fact that it’s possible at all for any, you know, somewhat safe swimming in rivers like the Seine right now is because of those regulations like the one from Mary-Kate and Ashley movie Passport to Paris or whatever. It’s because of those regulations that targeted the obvious and easy places where waste was being dumped into our water—so like the pipes just dumping industrial waste straight into the water. That’s what Jefferson called the “low-hanging fruit.”

Jefferson: So once you’ve taken care of, like, the paint and the oil and stuff going into the river from the factories, what you’re left with is this harder problem that we call nonpoint source pollution. It’s the pollution that’s coming from a million different little places, right?

In the air it’s the stuff coming out of the tailpipes of our cars. For water it’s stormwater runoff: it’s all the water coming off the rooftops and pavements, being carried by thousands of pipes, coming into every small stream, every river, you know, from every neighborhood.

Parshall: So that stormwater that’s coming from all those pipes, it’s a problem because it’s carrying things like fertilizer, pesticides, bacteria—basically all sorts of stuff that you just don’t want in the water. And even worse, in many cities like Paris—also kind of, like, 60 percent of New York—when it enters stormwater drains, it gets funneled into the same pipes that carry the raw sewage to our wastewater plants, and when it rains too much, you get a bit of a backup.

Jefferson: In order to keep this sewage-stormwater mix from backing up into people’s houses, you have what are called combined sewer overflows, so sort of like the safety pressure release valves on the system where now water is being diverted out of the sewage network and directly into streams, rivers and lakes. And this was one of those “it seemed like a good idea at the time” legacies that constrain what we do now.

Parshall: And the reason it’s so constraining is because it’s so expensive to fix. Basically what you’d have to do is dig up all of those combined pipes and replace them with two sets: one for sewage, one for stormwater. And some cities like Minneapolis have tried to do that, but probably the more common option is to just find somewhere to store all of that mixed sewer-stormwater stuff until the treatment plant is ready to take care of it, so I reached out to Bruno Pigott, the acting assistant administrator for water at the EPA, and he mentioned some ways that cities are going about doing this.

Bruno Pigott: In Indianapolis, for example, they put in a 28-mile tunnel [system] underground that captures all this combined sewage before it gets to a water body, stores it and then sends it to a wastewater treatment plant for cleanup.

Parshall: So he actually told me a bit about this time that he got to visit the site of that project. He was working for the state of Indiana at the time, in, like, the 2010s. And this project is still under construction—and it cost $2 billion.

Feltman: Wow.

Pigott: I went down as they were building the tunnel and went into it—so the sewage that eventually will be in that tunnel was not, luckily, there when I was in it. But it looks very much like a tunnel that you would see in a subway. I mean, it’s that big. It’s tremendously large. You could drive a truck down this tunnel. It is, it’s so deep that it stores millions of gallons of sewage so that the treatment plants can actually treat it and send it out in a clean form back to the river.

Parshall: So that’s not too different from Paris’ main solution ahead of the Olympic Games. They also just built this very big basin to hold all of that raw sewage-stormwater mix.

Feltman: Oh, yeah ...

Parshall: Yeah.

Feltman: “The shove it all under the bed” method—tried and true [laughs].

Parshall: [Laughs] Well, it’s more like “shove it under the bed, and then take a little bit out of it every day for the next few months until you can finally take care of it all” ...

Feltman: Oh, great ...

Parshall: So, yeah, yeah ...

Feltman: That’s actually really nice.

Parshall: So it’s not like—it’s not gonna sit in there forever. It’s actually kind of the logical solution because the whole problem in the first place is just the system does not have enough capacity to deal with all of this water. Their backup plan is dump it in rivers, which is not all that logical—it’s just, like Anne Jefferson said, seemed like a good idea at the time.

This is probably just as logical of a solution, besides, you know, replacing all the pipes or scaling up the wastewater treatment’s capacity. But basically this basin, even though it sounds like it would be maybe the cheaper option, is still pretty expensive: they spent €90 million on it; that’s about $97 million. And that reservoir holds 50,000 cubic meters of liquid, so that is 20 Olympic-size swimming pools’ worth of raw sewage mélange that might otherwise get dumped into the river for the actual Olympic swimmers.

Feltman: Incredible.

Parshall: So that basin was completed in May, and bacteria levels in the water, which is the main concern for the swimming events, were still measuring too high throughout June, and that’s partially just because it’s been so unseasonably rainy, causing a lot more of those combined sewer overflows.

For what it’s worth, the Olympics president said that he remains confident that the weather will be fine and the river will be fine come the end of July, so, you know, there’s that. But I did get to speak with someone who actually had the opportunity to swim in the Seine. Her name is Sibylle van der Walt. She’s the president of a clean water advocacy organization based in France.

Sibylle van der Walt: It does mean a little bit of courage to, to, to swim in the Seine, firstly because the water is dark. It’s, it’s not transparent, and that is not a good sign.

Feltman: How murky are we talking about here?

Parshall: She told me that she couldn’t see much further down than about a foot [roughly 0.3 meters], so most of her body was totally obscured by the water.

Feltman: Ugh, that’s—yeah, ew [laughs].

Van der Walt: But it didn’t smell bad, that I can say, and I didn’t have a problem afterwards, so I was perhaps just lucky, and first you think, “Oh, what is—what am I doing here?” and so, but then you get used to it, and then it was actually very pleasant. It’s, it’s fun.

Parshall: So Van der Walt got involved in the movement for swimmable urban rivers when she moved to France after living in Germany and Switzerland, and those are two countries where swimming in rivers is far more common.

Van der Walt: I used to work at the University of Bern, where you have a river called Aare, and there even the president of the parliament goes for a swim during the lunch break, and it’s really, like, everyone walks around in a swimming costume and walks up the river, jumps in and comes back.

Parshall: Apparently some people in Bern actually use the river to commute one way to work during the summers ...

Feltman: What?

Parshall: Like, they, like, pack up their belongings in floating, waterproof bags and just go for a dip, and I guess just coast home.

Feltman: Oh, my gosh, I—so I assumed you meant, like, boating, but, no, we’re talking about people swimming ...

Parshall: No, yeah—in the water.

Feltman: Briefcase bobbing along behind them—incredible [laughs].

Parshall: [Laughs] I literally did not believe this. I thought that it was one of those Internet stories, made up, and it doesn’t seem like this is something that people do really often, but I did email the Swiss Lifesaving Society—it’s a lifeguard association—to confirm because it sounded so far-fetched, and they warned me that the current in the river that goes through Bern is no joke, and they actually don’t recommend swimming in it right now, but some people appear to actually do this. And this kind of river-swimming culture seems like a total dream to me, that’s something totally unattainable in Paris and definitely in New York City, where we both live, and ...

Feltman: Yeah.

Parshall: Like, sure, these rivers are no longer full of stinky industrial waste, and cities are turning back toward them by building waterfront parks and business districts, but swimming in them? It feels harder ...

Feltman: Yeah, yeah, a river doesn’t have to be on fire for me to not wanna swim in it. There’s, there’s a spectrum, really, from “on fire” to, to “swimmable,” and I don’t really feel like the Hudson is there yet.

Parshall: Yeah, apparently they do the triathlon in—the New York City Triathlon—the swimming part is in the Hudson, so, you know, I’m not tempted to do that.

Feltman: [Laughs] Yeah, I think I briefly, in, like, a moment of complete delusion a few years ago, I was like, “Maybe I’m gonna try to get into triathlons.” And I honestly don’t remember if the part about the triathlon being in the Hudson River was, like, a selling point to me, or if that was the moment when I was like, “Wait, I’ve suddenly remembered I absolutely don’t want to do a triathlon under any circumstances.”

Parshall: I mean, I did go to the beach for the first time since moving to New York last weekend, and I was shocked at how pleasant it was. I think I forgot how much it’s enjoyable ...

Feltman: Oh, yeah.

Parshall: To swim in, like, natural waters.

I mean, they’re installing a pool in the East River now in New York. They call it a, quote, “giant strainer” dropped into the river. So relatively soon you should be able to do that.

Feltman: Yeah, I remember when the renderings for that first went around, and I, like, I would totally do it, but I kind of feel like tourists and, like, wannabe influencers are gonna make it terrible even if there isn’t tons of pathogenic bacteria in it. So, yeah, fingers crossed, but I, I have to say, I’m not optimistic.

So, yeah, I’m getting the impression that, like, unless a city makes a big effort to make swimming safe, and that that’s been confirmed by outside testing, like, you probably don’t want to go do laps in an urban river. Would you say that’s true?

Parshall: I don’t know if it totally needs a big effort in every city—some of them are just not as bad. Like, Sibylle Van der Walt told me about a couple cities in France where the quality is kind of fine already.

But basically, if you’re looking at swimming in pretty much any urban waterway, you’re gonna wanna take precautions. And that includes checking the recent bacterial accounts for the water, if that information is available—a lot of cities do make it available. And just, when in doubt, do not swim after heavy rains, especially if the city has combined sewer and stormwater systems.

Feltman: Sure, makes sense.

Parshall: Yeah, also—whether or not the Olympians are actually able to swim in the Seine, at this point, you know, it’s a little bit of an act of God, but Paris’ mayor, Anne Hidalgo, and other Siene cleanup proponents, they really emphasize that this project will benefit Parisians beyond the Olympics, regardless of whether or not the Olympians are able to swim.

So the government of Paris has said that there will be three public swimming sites that will be open for the summer of 2025. That’s next summer.

Feltman: Yeah, no, that’s a really good point. And, you know, so much Olympics infrastructure, like, ends up not being useful to cities, you know, kind of infamously, after the fact, but it’s true that a clean, swimmable river is something that is gonna be really impactful.

Parshall: Yeah, there’s a lot of kind of schadenfreude surrounding this whole situation, I think, just because the Olympics can be so fraught: There’s so much money involved. There’s livelihoods involved. There’s—France is in the midst of a difficult political time. It makes sense that people are so—have so—focused in on this as kind of a, a symbol of the success of the Olympics.

But putting all of that aside, it, it seems like an uncomplicated good to me to be able to say, “Hey, this river is swimmable now,” or at least it’s a lot closer to swimmable, or even if it isn’t swimmable, there is, you know, 50 Olympic swimming pool worth of raw sewage that is, in the worst-case scenario …

Feltman: No longer in the river.

Parshall: Not being dumped into the river.

I think, you know, if, if the Olympics has to be the excuse for them to spend €90 million on it—which, again, like, in comparison, Indianapolis spent $2 billion—so it, it can be, it can be a really fraught topic, but at the same time, hey, clean water—seems like a good thing.

Feltman: [Laughs] It’s true. We all love our water to not be full of poop.

So, listeners, what’s your take: Would you go swimming in the Seine? Let us know at ScienceQuickly@sciam.com. While you’re there, feel free to share any feedback you have for us or any suggestions you have for topics we should cover. And if you have a second, it would also be great if you could give us a quick rating and review wherever you are listening to this podcast right now.

Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was reported and co-hosted by Allison Parshall. Madison Goldberg and Anaissa Ruiz Tejada edit our show, with fact-checking from Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.

For Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend!

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Toxic Pfas above proposed safety limits in almost all English waters tested

Exclusive: 110 of 117 bodies of water tested by Environment Agency would fail standards, with levels in fish 322 times the planned limitNearly all rivers, lakes and ponds in England tested for a range of Pfas, known as “forever chemicals”, exceed proposed new safety limits and 85% contain levels at least five times higher, analysis of official data reveals.Out of 117 water bodies tested by the Environment Agency for multiple types of Pfas, 110 would fail the safety standard, according to analysis by Wildlife and Countryside Link and the Rivers Trust. Continue reading...

Nearly all rivers, lakes and ponds in England tested for a range of Pfas, known as “forever chemicals”, exceed proposed new safety limits and 85% contain levels at least five times higher, analysis of official data reveals.Out of 117 water bodies tested by the Environment Agency for multiple types of Pfas, 110 would fail the safety standard, according to analysis by Wildlife and Countryside Link and the Rivers Trust.They also found levels of Pfos – a banned carcinogenic Pfas – in fish were on average 322 times higher than planned limits for wildlife. If just one portion of such freshwater fish was eaten each month this would exceed the safe threshold of Pfos for people to consume over a year, according to the NGOs.Pfas, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a group of thousands of human-made chemicals used in industrial processes and products such as non-stick pans, clothing and firefighting foams. They do not break down in the environment and some are linked to diseases, including cancers and hormone disruption.Pfas pollution is widespread, prompting the EU to propose a new water quality standard that limits the combined toxicity of 24 Pfas to 4.4 nanograms per litre of water, calculated as PFOA-equivalents – a method that weights each substance according to its toxicity relative to PFOA, a particularly hazardous and well-studied carcinogen that is now banned.The EU is also planning to regulate about 10,000 Pfas as one class as there are too many to assess on a case-by-case basis and because none break down in the environment, but the UK has no plans to follow suit.Last week, environment groups, led by the Marine Conservation Society, wrote to ministers, urging a ban on all Pfas in consumer products and a timeline for phasing them out in all other uses. Now, public health and nature groups have joined forces to propose urgent measures to rein in pollution.“Scientists continue to identify Pfas as one of the biggest threats of our time, yet the UK is falling behind other countries in restricting them,” said Hannah Evans of the environmental charity Fidra. “Every day of inaction locks in decades of pollution and environmental harm … we’re asking the UK government to turn off the tap of these persistent forever chemicals.”They say the UK should align with the EU’s group-based Pfas restrictions and ban the substances in food packaging, clothing, cosmetics, toys and firefighting foams, following examples from Denmark, France and the EU. They want better monitoring, tougher water and soil standards and to make polluters cover the cost of Pfas clean-up.Emma Adler, the director of impact at Wildlife and Countryside Link, said: “Pfas are linked to an explosion of impacts for wildlife and public health, from cancers to immune issues. These new figures underline just how widespread Pfas pollution is and that Pfas regulation must be a much clearer priority in government missions to clean up UK rivers and improve the nation’s health.”Thalie Martini, the chief executive officer at Breast Cancer UK, said: “Evidence points to the potential for some Pfas to be related to health issues, including increasing breast cancer risk … millions of families affected by this disease will want the government to do everything they can to deliver tougher Pfas rules to protect our health.”Last year, 59 Pfas experts urged the government to follow the science and regulate all Pfas as a single class, warning their extreme persistence – regardless of toxicity – posed a serious environmental threat.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotion“Countries like France and Denmark, the EU as a whole and many US states have taken strong action against Pfas pollution,” said Dr Francesca Ginley from the Marine Conservation Society. “The time is now for the UK to take a stand and show the leadership we need on Pfas pollution from source to sea.”Dr Shubhi Sharma of the charity Chem Trust said: “Too often with hazardous chemicals the world has ignored early warnings of harm and learned lessons far too late. Costs to tackle Pfas in the environment and address health impacts have a multi-billion pound economic price tag … the government must not delay.”An Environment Agency spokesperson said the science on Pfas was moving quickly and that it was running a multi-year programme to improve understanding of Pfas pollution sources in England. They added: “We are screening sites to identify potential sources of Pfas pollution and prioritise further investigations, whilst assessing how additional control measures could reduce the risks of Pfas in the environment.”A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “The government is committed to protecting human health and the environment from the risks posed by Pfas. That’s why we are working at pace together with regulators to assess levels of Pfas in the environment, their sources and potential risks to inform our approach to policy and regulation.”

Breaking Down the Force of Water in the Texas Floods

Flash floods last week in Texas caused the Guadalupe River to rise dramatically, reaching three stories high in just two hours

Over just two hours, the Guadalupe River at Comfort, Texas, rose from hip-height to three stories tall, sending water weighing as much as the Empire State building downstream roughly every minute it remained at its crest.Comfort offers a good lens to consider the terrible force of a flash flood’s wall of water because it’s downstream of where the river’s rain-engorged branches met. The crest was among the highest ever recorded at the spot — flash flooding that appears so fast it can “warp our brains,” said James Doss-Gollin, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University.The Texas flood smashed through buildings, carried away cars and ripped sturdy trees out by the roots, dropping the debris in twisted piles when the water finally ebbed. It killed more than 100 people, prompted scores of rescues and left dozens of others missing. The deaths were concentrated upriver in Kerr County, an area that includes Camp Mystic, the devastated girls' camp, where the water hit early and with little notice.Water is capable of such destruction because it is heavy and can move fast. Just one cubic foot of water — imagine a box a bit larger than the size of a basketball — weighs about 62 pounds (28 kilograms). When the river rose to its peak at Comfort, 177,000 cubic feet — or 11 million pounds (5 million kilograms) of water — flowed by every second.“When you have that little lead time ... that means you can’t wait until the water level starts to rise,” Doss-Gollin said. “You need to take proactive measures to get people to safety.” Water as heavy as a jumbo jet A small amount of water — less than many might think — can sweep away people, cars and homes. Six inches (15.2 centimeters) is enough to knock people off their feet. A couple of feet of fast-moving water can take away an SUV or truck, and even less can move cars.“Suppose you are in a normal car, a normal sedan, and a semitrailer comes and pushes you at the back of the car. That’s the kind of force you’re talking about,” said Venkataraman Lakshmi, a University of Virginia professor and president of the hydrology section of the American Geophysical Union.And at Comfort, it took just over 15 minutes for so much water to arrive that not only could it float away a large pickup truck, but structures were in danger — water as heavy as a jumbo jet moved by every second.At that point, “We are past vehicles, homes and things can start being affected,” said Daniel Henz, flood warning program manager at the flood control district of Maricopa County, Arizona, an area that gets dangerous scary flash floods.The water not only pushes objects but floats them, and that can actually be scarier. The feeling of being pushed is felt immediately, letting a person know they are in danger. Upward force may not be felt until it is overwhelming, according to Upmanu Lall, a water expert at Arizona State University and Columbia University.“The buoyancy happens — it’s like a yes, no situation. If the water reaches a certain depth and it has some velocity, you’re going to get knocked off (your feet) and floating simultaneously,” he said. The mechanics of a flash flood The landscape created the conditions for what some witnesses described as a fast-moving wall of water. Lots of limestone covered by a thin layer of soil in hilly country meant that when rain fell, it ran quickly downhill with little of it absorbed by the ground, according to S. Jeffress Williams, senior scientist emeritus with the U.S. Geological Survey.A flash flood generally starts with an initial lead wave and then builds as rain rushes over the landscape and into the river basin. It may rise quickly, but the water still takes some time to converge. The water crumpled cars into piles, twisted steel and knocked trees down as if they were strands of grass. Images captured the chaos and randomness of the water’s violence.And then, not as fast as it rose, but still quickly, the river receded.Five hours after its crest at Comfort, it had already dropped 10 feet (3 meters), revealing its damage in retreat. A couple of days after it started to rise, a person could stand with their head above the river again.“Everything just can happen, very, very quickly,” Henz said.Associated Press writer Seth Borenstein in Washington contributed.The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environmentCopyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - June 2025

South West Water allowed to invest £24m rather than pay £19m fine

Campaigners say Ofwat ‘subservient to industry and its rampaging pursuit of profit’ after illegal sewage dischargesSouth West Water has agreed to pay a £24m penalty for illegal sewage discharges into the environment from its treatment works.The regulator for the water and wastewater sector in England and Wales, Ofwat, says the company, which has 1.8 million customers in Cornwall, Devon, the Isles of Scilly and parts of Dorset and Somerset, is being penalised for dumping sewage in breach of its legal permit conditions. Continue reading...

South West Water has agreed to pay a £24m penalty for illegal sewage discharges into the environment from its treatment works.The regulator for the water and wastewater sector in England and Wales, Ofwat, says the company, which has 1.8 million customers in Cornwall, Devon, the Isles of Scilly and parts of Dorset and Somerset, is being sanctioned for dumping sewage in breach of its legal permit conditions.But there was anger over revelations on Thursday that the regulator had not imposed a direct fine on the company.South West Water put forward the suggestion that it would invest £20m to reduce sewage discharges at key storm overflows, spend £2m to tackle sewer misuse and misconnections, and another £2m to support local environment groups. This was accepted by Ofwat rather than imposing a fine of £19m.But Rob Abrams, the campaigns manager at Surfers Against Sewage, said allowing water companies to choose their own penalty was farcical.He said the situation “illustrates a water industry model that’s broken beyond repair, with government and regulators subservient to industry and its rampaging pursuit of profit, at any cost”.Ofwat said it had chosen this route rather than imposing a fine because it was satisfied that the company would carry out the work required to bring its infrastructure back into legal operation.“We have … concluded that it would be appropriate to accept the undertakings in lieu of the financial penalty we would otherwise impose in this case (£19m, 6.5% of its relevant turnover),” Ofwat said.The regulator carried out a two-year investigation into the company that found it had failed to upgrade its treatment works to prevent sewage discharges into the environment, failed to properly deal with the content of its sewers and failed to put in the resources to monitor its treatment works properly.The penalty is the latest in an ongoing investigation by Ofwat into several water companies into widespread illegal sewage dumping across the network from thousands of treatment plants.Penalties totalling more than £160m have already been imposed against Yorkshire Water, Thames Water and Northumbrian Water for widespread illegal sewage dumping from their treatment works.Lynn Parker, the senior director for enforcement at Ofwat, said the regulator had secured the £24m package and a commitment to put things right from the company.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Business TodayGet set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morningPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionBut Abrams said it amounted to a cynical PR exercise and an abdication of responsibility by Ofwat.“There is no transparency about how the money will be spent or whether it’s even enough,” he said.“Of the £4m pledged for environmental initiatives and local groups, we’ve been given no clarity on who will benefit or why.”The public and other stakeholders can make representations about the size of the penalty before it is finalised.

Oregon groundwater protection bill passes despite criticism that it’s too weak

Gov. Tina Kotek backed the bill to modernize Oregon’s failed groundwater pollution laws.

Legislators have just passed a groundwater protection bill that many nonprofit groups working on groundwater contamination said was too watered down to make a real difference. Gov. Tina Kotek backed the bill to modernize Oregon’s failed groundwater pollution laws. Kotek has been active in trying to speed up response to the three-decades-old groundwater contamination crisis in the Lower Umatilla Basin, where many residents with nitrate-contaminated domestic wells must rely on bottled drinking water. Until 2022, many people in the region had no idea they had been drinking contaminated water for years. Some still don’t know it because the state has yet to test all the affected wells. A state analysis also has shown that nitrate pollution in the area has worsened significantly over the past decade. Though the state has been testing wells and conducting public awareness campaigns, critics have accused the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, Department of Agriculture and Water Resources Department of not doing enough to crack down on the pollution sources. Much of the nitrate contamination comes from fertilizer used by large farms, animal manure from local industrial dairies and feedlots and wastewater from food processing plants that are constantly applied to farm fields. Early versions of the bill laid out specific actions that state agencies would have to take once groundwater pollution had reached the level of a serious public health threat. But many of those actions were stripped out of the bill, leading environmental and social justice nonprofits to pull their support because they deemed the bill too weak to make a difference. Oregon Rural Action, the eastern Oregon nonprofit that has been instrumental in testing domestic wells and pushing the state to do more testing and to limit nitrate pollution, said industry groups representing polluters put pressure on the governor’s office, leading to major changes in the bill’s language. “The version passed on Friday no longer includes the tools, resources, and Legislative directives needed for agencies to exercise their authority to protect Oregon’s groundwater and enforce the law,”the group’s executive director, Kristin Anderson Ostrom, said in a statement. The governor’s office declined to comment.Kotek in January issued an emergency order allowing the Port of Morrow to again violate its water pollution permit and over-apply nitrogen contaminated water onto farmland. The port, which handles billions of gallons of nitrogen-rich water every year, said that it would have to pause operations and lay off workers if not for the emergency permit. In addition to the Lower Umatilla Basin, Oregon has designated two other areas – in northern Malheur County and the southern Willamette Valley – where elevated nitrate concentrations in groundwater pose a human health risk. Each one has an action plan to reduce nitrate concentrations in groundwater. Research has linked high nitrate consumption over long periods to stomach, bladder and intestinal cancers, miscarriages and thyroid issues. It is especially dangerous to infants who can quickly develop “blue baby syndrome,” a fatal illness.— Gosia Wozniacka covers environmental justice, climate change, the clean energy transition and other environmental issues. Reach her at gwozniacka@oregonian.com or 971-421-3154.

A rare glimpse inside the mountain tunnel that carries water to Southern California

In the 1930s, workers bored a 13-mile tunnel beneath Mt. San Jacinto. Here's a look inside the engineering feat that carries Colorado River water to Southern California.

Thousands of feet below the snowy summit of Mt. San Jacinto, a formidable feat of engineering and grit makes life as we know it in Southern California possible. The 13-mile-long San Jacinto Tunnel was bored through the mountain in the 1930s by a crew of about 1,200 men who worked day and night for six years, blasting rock and digging with machinery. Completed in 1939, the tunnel was a cornerstone in the construction of the 242-mile Colorado River Aqueduct. It enabled the delivery of as much as 1 billion gallons of water per day.The tunnel is usually off-limits when it is filled and coursing with a massive stream of Colorado River water. But recently, while it was shut down for annual maintenance, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California opened the west end of the passage to give The Times and others a rare look inside. “It’s an engineering marvel,” said John Bednarski, an assistant general manager of MWD. “It’s pretty awe-inspiring.” The 16-foot-diameter San Jacinto Tunnel runs 13 miles through the mountain. While shut down for maintenance, the tunnel has a constant stream of water entering from the mountain. A group visits the west end of the San Jacinto Tunnel, where the mouth of the water tunnel enters a chamber. He wore a hard hat as he led a group to the gaping, horseshoe-shaped mouth of the tunnel. The passage’s concrete arch faded in the distance to pitch black.The tunnel wasn’t entirely empty. The sound of rushing water echoed from the walls as an ankle-deep stream flowed from the portal and cascaded into a churning pool beneath metal gates. Many in the tour group wore rubber boots as they stood on moist concrete in a chamber faintly lit by filtered sunlight, peering into the dark tunnel. This constant flow comes as groundwater seeps and gushes from springs that run through the heart of the mountain. In places deep in the tunnel, water shoots so forcefully from the floor or the wall that workers have affectionately named these soaking obstacles “the fire hose” and “the car wash.”Standing by the flowing stream, Bednarski called it “leakage water from the mountain itself.”Mt. San Jacinto rises 10,834 feet above sea level, making it the second-highest peak in Southern California after 11,503-foot Mt. San Gorgonio.As the tunnel passes beneath San Jacinto’s flank, as much as 2,500 feet of solid rock lies overhead, pierced only by two vertical ventilation shafts. Snow covers Mt. San Jacinto, as seen from Whitewater, in March. At the base of the mountain, the 13-mile San Jacinto Tunnel starts its journey. The tunnel transports Colorado River water to Southern California’s cities. During maintenance, workers roll through on a tractor equipped with a frame bearing metal bristles that scrape the tunnel walls, cleaning off algae and any growth of invasive mussels. Workers also inspect the tunnel by passing through on an open trailer, scanning for any cracks that require repairs.“It’s like a Disneyland ride,” said Bryan Raymond, an MWD conveyance team manager. “You’re sitting on this trailer, and there’s a bunch of other people on it too, and you’re just cruising through looking at the walls.” Aside from the spraying and trickling water, employee Michael Volpone said he has also heard faint creaking.“If you sit still and listen, you can kind of hear the earth move,” he said. “It’s a little eerie.”Standing at the mouth of the tunnel, the constant babble of cascading water dominates the senses. The air is moist but not musty. Put a hand to the clear flowing water, and it feels warm enough for a swim. On the concrete walls are stained lines that extend into the darkness, marking where the water often reaches when the aqueduct is running full. Many who have worked on the aqueduct say they are impressed by the system’s design and how engineers and workers built such a monumental system with the basic tools and technology available during the Great Depression.Pipelines and tunnelsThe search for a route to bring Colorado River water across the desert to Los Angeles began with the signing of a 1922 agreement that divided water among seven states. After the passage of a $2-million bond measure by Los Angeles voters in 1925, hundreds of surveyors fanned out across the largely roadless Mojave and Sonoran deserts to take measurements and study potential routes.The surveyors traveled mostly on horseback and on foot as they mapped the rugged terrain, enduring grueling days in desert camps where the heat sometimes topped 120 degrees.Planners studied and debated more than 100 potential paths before settling on one in 1931. The route began near Parker, Ariz., and took a curving path through desert valleys, around obstacles and, where there was no better option, through mountains.In one official report, a manager wrote that “to bore straight through the mountains is very expensive and to pump over them is likewise costly.” He said the planners carefully weighed these factors as they decided on a solution that would deliver water at the lowest cost. VIDEO | 02:45 A visit to the giant tunnel that brings Colorado River water to Southern California Share via Those in charge of the Metropolitan Water District, which had been created in 1928 to lead the effort, were focused on delivering water to 13 participating cities, including Los Angeles, Burbank and Anaheim. William Mulholland, Los Angeles’ chief water engineer, had led an early scouting party to map possible routes from the Colorado River to Southern California’s cities in 1923, a decade after he celebrated the completion of the 233-mile aqueduct from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles with the triumphant words, “There it is. Take it.”The aqueduct’s design matched the audaciousness of the giant dams the federal government was starting to build along the Colorado — Hoover Dam (originally called Boulder Dam) and Parker Dam, which formed the reservoir where the aqueduct would begin its journey.Five pumping plants would be built to lift water more than 1,600 feet along the route across the desert. Between those points, water would run by gravity through open canals, buried pipelines and 29 separate tunnels stretching 92 miles — the longest of which was a series of nine tunnels running 33.7 miles through hills bordering the Coachella Valley.To make it possible, voters in the district’s 13 cities overwhelmingly approved a $220-million bond in 1931, the equivalent of a $4.5-billion investment today, which enabled the hiring of 35,000 workers. Crews set up camps, excavated canals and began to blast open shafts through the desert’s rocky spines to make way for water.In 1933, workers started tearing into the San Jacinto Mountains at several locations, from the east and the west, as well as excavating shafts from above. Black-and-white photographs and films showed miners in hard hats and soiled uniforms as they stood smoking cigarettes, climbing into open rail cars and running machinery that scooped and loaded piles of rocks.Crews on another hulking piece of equipment, called a jumbo, used compressed-air drills to bore dozens of holes, which were packed with blasting power and detonated to pierce the rock. (Courtesy of Metropolitan Water District of Southern California) The work progressed slowly, growing complicated when the miners struck underground streams, which sent water gushing in.According to a 1991 history of the MWD titled “A Water Odyssey,” one flood in 1934 disabled two of three pumps that had been brought in to clear the tunnel. In another sudden flood, an engineer recalled that “the water came in with a big, mad rush and filled the shaft to the top. Miners scrambled up the 800-foot ladder to the surface, and the last man out made it with water swirling around his waist.”Death and delaysAccording to the MWD’s records, 13 workers died during the tunnel’s construction, including men who were struck by falling rocks, run over by equipment or electrocuted with a wire on one of the mining trolleys that rolled on railroad tracks. The Metropolitan Water District had originally hired Wenzel & Henoch Construction Co. to build the tunnel. But after less than two years, only about two miles of the tunnel had been excavated, and the contractor was fired by MWD general manager Frank Elwin “F.E.” Weymouth, who assigned the district’s engineers and workers to complete the project.Construction was delayed again in 1937 when workers went on strike for six weeks. But in 1939, the last wall of rock tumbled down, uniting the east and west tunnels, and the tunnel was finished. John Bednarski, assistant general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, stands in a water tunnel near the end point of the larger San Jacinto Tunnel, which carries Colorado River water. The total cost was $23.5 million. But there also were other costs. As the construction work drained water, many nearby springs used by the Native Soboba people stopped flowing. The drying of springs and creeks left the tribe’s members without water and starved their farms, which led to decades of litigation by the Soboba Band of Luiseño Indians and eventually a legal settlement in 2008 that resolved the tribe’s water rights claims.The ‘magic touch’ of waterBy the time the tunnel was completed, the Metropolitan Water District had released a 20-minute film that was shown in movie theaters and schools celebrating its conquest of the Colorado River and the desert. It called Mt. San Jacinto the “tallest and most forbidding barrier.”In a rich baritone, the narrator declared Southern California “a new empire made possible by the magic touch of water.” “Water required to support this growth and wealth could not be obtained from the local rainfall in this land of sunshine,” the narrator said as the camera showed newly built homes and streets filled with cars and buses. “The people therefore realized that a new and dependable water supply must be provided, and this new water supply has been found on the lofty western slopes of the Rocky Mountains, a wonderland of beauty, clad by nature in a white mantle of snow.”Water began to flow through the aqueduct in 1939 as the pumping plants were tested. At the Julian Hinds Pumping Plant, near the aqueduct’s halfway point, water was lifted 441 feet, surging through three pipelines up a desert mountain. March 2012 image of the 10-foot-diameter delivery lines carrying water 441 feet uphill from the Julian Hinds Pumping Plant. (Los Angeles Times) From there, the water flowed by gravity, moving at 3-6 mph as it traveled through pipelines, siphons and tunnels. It entered the San Jacinto Tunnel in Cabazon, passed under the mountain and emerged near the city of San Jacinto, then continued in pipelines to Lake Mathews reservoir in Riverside County. In 1941, Colorado River water started flowing to Pasadena, Beverly Hills, Compton and other cities. Within six years, another pipeline was built to transport water from the aqueduct south to San Diego.The influx of water fueled Southern California’s rapid growth during and after World War II.Over decades, the dams and increased diversions also took an environmental toll, drying up much of the once-vast wetlands in Mexico’s Colorado River Delta. John Bednarski, assistant general manager of the Metropolitan Water District, walks in a water tunnel near the end point of the larger San Jacinto Tunnel. An impressive designToday, 19 million people depend on water delivered by the MWD, which also imports supplies from Northern California through the aqueducts and pipelines of the State Water Project.In recent decades, the agency has continued boring tunnels where needed to move water. A $1.2-billion, 44-mile-long conveyance system called the Inland Feeder, completed in 2009, involved boring eight miles of tunnels through the San Bernardino Mountains and another 7.9-mile tunnel under the Badlands in Riverside County.The system enabled the district to increase its capacity and store more water during wet years in Diamond Valley Lake, Southern California’s largest reservoir, which can hold about 260 billion gallons of water. “Sometimes tunneling is actually the most effective way to get from point A to point B,” said Deven Upadhyay, the MWD’s general manager.Speaking hypothetically, Upadhyay said, if engineers had another shot at designing and building the aqueduct now using modern technology, it’s hard to say if they would end up choosing the same route through Mt. San Jacinto or a different route around it. But the focus on minimizing cost might yield a similar route, he said.“Even to this day, it’s a pretty impressive design,” Upadhyay said.When people drive past on the I-10 in Cabazon, few realize that a key piece of infrastructure lies hidden where the desert meets the base of the mountain. At the tunnel’s exit point near San Jacinto, the only visible signs of the infrastructure are several concrete structures resembling bunkers. When the aqueduct is running, those who enter the facility will hear the rumble of rushing water. The tunnel’s west end was opened to a group of visitors in March, when the district’s managers held an event to name the tunnel in honor of Randy Record, who served on the MWD board for two decades and was chair from 2014 to 2018. Speaking to an audience, Upadhyay reflected on the struggles the region now faces as the Colorado River is sapped by drought and global warming, and he drew a parallel to the challenges the tunnel’s builders overcame in the 1930s. “They found a path,” Upadhyay said. “This incredible engineering feat. And it required strength, courage and really an innovative spirit.” “When we now think about the challenges that we face today, dealing with wild swings in climate and the potential reductions that we might face, sharing dwindling supplies on our river systems with the growing Southwest, it’s going to require the same thing — strength, courage and a spirit of innovation,” he said. A steep steel staircase gives access to a water tunnel near the end point of the larger San Jacinto Tunnel, which carries Colorado River water to Southern California.

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