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Paris on alert as Seine rises
PARIS, France -- Paris is clearing works of art from city basements and putting rescue boats on standby as it prepares for the possibility of the worst flooding from the river Seine for 90 years. The Seine, which usually snakes sedately through the French capital, was on Monday swelling into a raging torrent. Weeks of rain soaking and an already waterlogged subsoil have put Paris on emergency standby. Experts say it is only a matter of time before the Seine bursts its banks and spills into underground stations, cellars and sewers -- as it did almost a century ago. "It will happen. If not this year then next year. We are not far from the first alert level, and we're getting a lot of rain," Paris environmental official Alain Pialat told Reuters. Dreading being caught unawares by the kind of floods that swamped central European cities -- and some of France -- in August and September, Paris city planners have advised riverside museums like the Louvre to pack up valuables kept in basement rooms and move them to safety. Hospitals are emptying their basements of equipment and drawing up contingency plans in case electricity and heating is cut off by flooding and they have to evacuate patients.
Telephone, electricity and gas companies have been primed for action and the RATP metro and bus authority is working out how to seal up underground stations. Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe has even ordered a fleet of flat-bottomed boats in case police and rescue workers need to paddle through flooded city streets. The city's 2,100 kilometre (1,300 miles) long sewer system is equipped with 50 one-way overflow valves and a dozen pumping stations so that excess water flowing in off the streets during heavy rain will gush out into the Seine once the sewers fill up. But if the Seine reached street level, there would be no overflow left and damage could run to billions of dollars. "If the Seine flooded today like it did in 1910, there would be problems. It would be a huge headache. Our pumps are just not designed to cope with floods that big," a sewage worker told Reuters. Mindful of the huge cost of a clean-up, the authorities are keeping a watchful eye on the famous toes of the "Zouave" -- a 146-year-old statue of a soldier standing against a pillar of the Pont d'Alma bridge and a historic river marker. If the Zouave's toes get wet, Paris will be on flood alert. If his ankles go under, riverside roads will be closed. If his hips get wet -- not so far-fetched given that his knees went underwater last year -- the city will put into action an emergency flood plan it has been planning for a year. Thick slime and misery"Experts say sooner or later flooding on the level seen in 1910 could happen. It could be a year, five years or 10 years," Paris police chief Jean-Paul Proust told a news conference. Few in Paris would remember the flood of 1910, but newspapers have been printing faded sepia photos of bemused-looking people boating around the city centre.
A witness then, when the Seine swirled round the Zouave's neck, wrote of "thick black slime, abject shivering misery, and great lakes of yellow water, with here and there the upper story of a house rising like an island from the desolate waste." Even the Eiffel Tower had its feet in the water, and the palatial Orsay railway station, now the Musee d'Orsay art gallery, resembled a giant indoor swimming pool with steam engines parked on its bottom, eyewitness accounts say. Such flooding today would be devastating in a museum that houses works by Monet, Van Gogh, Renoir and Cezanne, valued sculptures and stunning decorative arts and furniture. The culture ministry plans to rent a massive warehouse where endangered artworks can be stored for the winter months. Over the river the Louvre, home to the Mona Lisa, is doing the same, horrified at the idea its treasures could be subjected to a last-minute rescue, as in the Zwinger palace gallery in Dresden, which was swamped by the flooded river Elbe in August. In the late summer, flooding in France in the area around the Gard region killed at least 21 people. Reuters contributed to this report.
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