It was an iconic and triumphant moment: The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, recently swam in the Seine just days before the river’s starring role in the Summer Olympics. The clean-up of the Seine has taken years and $1.5 billion, but the Olympic events are merely a capstone on an effort that will result in legalized swimming in the Seine after the games, an improved environment for wildlife, 26 swimming pools along the Seine set to open next year, and a 10-million gallon retaining system to contain some of the sewage that would otherwise get pushed into the river. The swimmable Seine is getting a ton of attention and will undoubtedly result in Philadelphians asking: Why can’t we swim in our river, too?
Paris is not the first major global city to have achieved this goal: Munich’s Isar River is frequently held up as an example of what is possible when you invest in cleaning up a river. Copenhagen, Vienna, and Zurich, all have swimmable rivers at least in part. Berlin and Amsterdam are trying to make their waterways swimmable.
In the U.S., ever since the Clean Water Act of 1972, we’ve had the goal of making all the country’s waterways safe for fishing, swimming and drinking — but more than 50 years later, few urban rivers are truly swimmable. Perhaps the most impressive is Oklahoma City, where the city has focused on creating a riversport complex. If you thought it was super random that OKC was hosting part of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, now you know why: it has a river where people can canoe slalom.
Cities like Boston allow people to swim in the river once a year at a big event. But in a similar effort this summer, Washington, D.C. tried to host a swim day in the Anacostia River that had to be postponed three times because of E. coli levels, giving us all a reality check: most urban rivers are also urban sewers.
Urban…sewers?
Many cities in Europe and older cities like Philadelphia built combined sewer systems in the 1800s. These sewer systems gather both rainwater and sewage into the same pipes running under the city. When there’s a heavy rainstorm, the rainwater overwhelms the system, pushing sewage into rivers. In fact, in Paris, officials have had to delay events because heavy rain over the weekend made the Seine unswimmable again.
While high levels of fecal matter are a major problem for cities that want to clean up their rivers, there are also other kinds of pollution. In the U.S. where regulation is lax, there’s toxic dumping and accidents that happen pretty regularly in many watersheds.
In the U.S., ever since the Clean Water Act of 1972, we’ve had the goal of making all the country’s waterways safe for fishing, swimming and drinking — but more than 50 years later, few urban rivers are truly swimmable.
Remember how last year Philadelphia officials told residents to drink bottled water after a chemical spill threatened the city’s water supply? When you see that the penalty for this incident was a measly $2.7 million doled out to nearby residents in the form of $25 gift cards, you realize how easy it is to keep trashing our rivers.
It’s been a few decades since the notorious river fires of the late 1960s, but that legacy of toxic dumping is never too far behind — the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire again in 2020 when a tanker spilled its flaming oil on the river.
While we definitely need to continue to clean our urban rivers and make them more accessible, it feels to me that making them swimmable is more Instagram #goals than policy priority.
Is river swimming what we really need?
A recent report by the Penn Water Center explores what it would take to expand swimming access in the Delaware River. The report conveys the need for more equitable access to water and an improved environment for wildlife and drinking water. But remediating our rivers doesn’t come cheap and the report estimated at least $2 billion for a clean up of the Delaware.
How much green stormwater mitigation could you buy with $2 billion to prevent water from flowing into the river in the first place and prevent all the other problems that come to Philadelphia’s flood-prone areas when there’s an extraordinary rain? How could that money improve the safety, quality and cost of drinking water? How many public pools could you maintain, build, and staff for longer seasons for $2 billion? What kinds of non-swimming recreation or waterfront public space could you build with $2 billion?
You get my point — we have a lot of ways of achieving similarly important environmental and social equity goals beyond swimmable rivers but they don’t have the cool factor.
Addressing the combined sewer issue is part of the problem, and fixing that infrastructure would have myriad benefits, including more areas safe for swimming — but shouldn’t the primary goal be the safety and quality of our drinking water given that 37 percent of residents don’t trust it? Why invest in swimming holes before repairing residential water infrastructure and equipment to ensure people are happy with what’s coming out of the tap? In a nod to the real challenge of the situation, the report proposes cost-effective ways to increase small pockets of swimming access along the river rather than a full-blown Paris style redux.
But the other part of the swimmable river trend that strikes me as strange is the inherent conflict between leisure and commerce in many major American cities. I think of New York City’s Harbor of the Future, which is squarely focused on growing the city’s shipping container port. South of Philadelphia, the Delaware River is being dredged to enable bigger container ships and Philly is welcoming new cruise ships that will soon be docking there. Aren’t these economic development goals in conflict with the effort to clean the river to swimmable levels? There seems to be a cognitive dissonance between the aspirations for the cleanest possible rivers and the economic benefit of ports.
Even in Paris, the Seine still serves 7 million tourists who take boats up the central part of the Seine, and the city still transports garbage on river barges. While the river featured prominently in Friday’s rainy opening ceremonies, the city’s famous tour boats, Bateaux Mouches, were scheduled to resume their schedule on Saturday. Perhaps the boat operators sense they have to get back on the water as soon as possible — their days may indeed be numbered.
Diana Lind is a writer and urban policy specialist. This article was also published as part of her Substack newsletter, The New Urban Order. Sign up for the newsletter here.
