-Caveat Lector-
From
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1782000/1782691.stm
}}}>Begin
Friday, 25 January, 2002, 17:09 GMT
Paris flood warning
Flooding in Paris in March last year >>image @ site<<
By Rory Mulholland in Paris
The French capital faces a repeat of the great flood of 1910 that
would leave hundreds of thousands without electricity and phones,
bring economic life to a standstill, and cost billions of euros in
damage.
An official report said the cost of such a flood would be about 10
billion euros
Alain Rist, Paris area regional council
Environmental officials say there is a serious risk that the river
Seine will burst its banks in Paris and surrounding areas this
winter.
Swathes of central Paris on both sides of the river could be submerged.
The national parliament, the Musée d'Orsay, the Louvre, the national library, train
stations and th
e finance ministry could all be flooded. Seventy percent of the underground transport
system would
be paralysed.
The rising level of the Seine in the capital has already triggered a first low-urgency
alert this w
inter. What worries the authorities is not the level itself, but the fact that it was
achieved with
relatively little rain
. The soil is so saturated that there is little prospect of it absorbing any excess
water.
'Record rainfall'
The Seine last burst its banks in 1910, when water levels rose to 8.72 metres,
flooding large parts
of the French capital for up to a fortnight.
Since then four dams have been built in the Paris region. These help to lower the
level of the Sein
e in the winter and to feed the river in the dry summer months. But the IIBRBS, a
state institution
in charge of the dams
in the Seine basin, says that at best they could reduce the level of the Seine by a
metre in case o
f flooding.
"Of course we don't know how much it will rain in the coming months," said Alain Rist,
the Green pa
rty vice-president of the Paris area regional council. "But we've had record rainfall
over the last
three years and the gr
oundwater levels are already saturated.
"An official report said the cost of such a flood would be about 10 billion euros," Mr
Rist told BB
C News Online. "I think that's a conservative estimate. How, for example, can you
calculate the eco
nomic impact of the met
ro not running for four months?"
The report on potential flooding, drawn up by the IIBRBS, said that the worst case
scenario would l
eave a million Parisians without telephones, 200,000 without electricity, and 80,000
without gas. E
conomic life would be s
tifled, it concluded.
Metro measures
When the Green party's Dominique Voynet became environment minister, she called for
existing plans
for the prevention of floods in urban areas to be brought up to date. But Mr Rist
criticises these
plans for being too leg
alistic and providing no real action plans for crisis situations.
He praises some bodies such as the Parisian transport authorities, which have just
completed a plan
that took three years to draw up. This includes erecting dykes at 400 positions in
the metro syste
m as soon as the Seine
reaches 7.10 metres at Austerlitz bridge in central Paris.
But Mr Rist says most, including the EDF, the state-run electricity
provider, are unprepared to deal with the effects of severe flooding.
"The Grande Bibliotheque (national library), for example, says it has
a pump system to deal with flooding," he says. "But the electricity
is likely to be cut and the pump won't work. They say they have a
generator, but that needs fuel and how will fuel tankers get to them
with the streets flooded? These sorts of things haven't been taken
into account."
He says the authorities should provide guidelines to private
companies and individuals living in Paris on what to do if the city
is flooded.
End<{{{
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