The Sewers of Paris
Yes, you can tour the sewers of Paris. And yes, of course I took pictures.
The Musée des Egouts de Paris is along the Seine, at the south end of Pont de l'Alma, a little to the east of the Eiffel Tower. The nearest Metro station is actually the Pont de l'Alma RER station.
The museum has a somewhat unusual operating schedule. It is closed Thursdays and Fridays, so it's open on Saturday through Wednesday.
You pay and enter at the kiosk seen here, the maintenance cover propped open is for the exit.
Once you get down below street level, you walk along a passageway and then enter into the sewers themselves through this door.
Paris has been ahead of most modern cities in waste treatment, and the tunnels have been built to a variety of specific cross-sectional shapes and dimensions.
The two narrow concrete paths on either side of a central channel allows for the use of specialized wheeled vehicles for cleaning and maintenance.
The tunnels range from fairly small to quite large.
Fairly large boats and wheeled vehicles are used to flush out some of the tunnels.
Some tunnels are cleaned with specially sized cleaning balls. Here you see a wagon used to transport the cleaning balls, and some of the balls themselves.
The balls are just slightly smaller than the tunnel, and they float. That forces water to pass below the ball at relatively high speed, flushing solid waste downstream and cleaning the tunnel.
The museum shows and explains the specialized clothing and equipment used by the workers.
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A series of exhibits explain the history of the water and waste treatment and of Paris in general from late Roman times through the present.
Until the Middle Ages, waste was poured onto fields or unpaved streets and filtered (at least somewhat) by the soil before re-entering the Seine.
Street paving started around 1200 AD under Philippe Auguste. The paving included a waste water drain at the center.
The first vaulted stone-walled sewer was built in Rue Montmartre in 1370, by Hugues Aubriot.
The first vaulted sewer network, some 30 km long, was built under Napoleon Bonaparte (ruled 1804-1814, 1815).
However, the sewer system as it exists today really dates from around 1850, when Baron Haussman and Eugène Belgrand designed the current system.
The current system has 2,100 km of tunnels, collecting 1.2 million cubic meters of waste water per day. 15,000 cubic meters of solid waste have to be removed from the tunnels every year. The waste flows to the Achères waste treatment plant, capable of handling more than 2 million cubic meters of waste per day. Some other smaller waste treatment plants are coming on line, at Noisy-le-Grand, Valenton, and Colombes.
And yes, of course there are toilets down within the sewer, so you can make a more direct deposit.
Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box. [....] Poor sanitation, bad hygiene, and unsafe water — usually unsafe because it has fecal particles in it — cause one in ten of the world's illnesses. [....] Diarrhea — nearly 90 percent of which is caused by fecally contaminated food or water — kills a child every fifteen seconds. The number of children who have died from diarrhea in the last decade [1998-2008] exceeds the total number of people killed by armed conflict since the Second World War.
In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.
The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet, by Julie Horan, contends that civilization began with the toilet.
Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, edited by Laura Noren and Harvey Molotch, has essays by anthropologists, sociologists, and architects on the importance of the toilet, especially for urban dwellers.
Latrinae Et Foricae: Toilets in the Roman World describes the toilets of the Roman Empire from Iberia to Syria, and from North Africa to Hadrian's Wall in Britannia.
Toilets, Bathtubs, Sinks, and Sewers: A History of the Bathroom, explains the history of personal cleanliness and hygiene to children in grades 5-8.
| A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used. |
How long have my Toilets of the World pages been around? I'm not exactly sure, although they started in the mid 1990s as a single page on a Purdue University server. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see what that looked like as far back as January 17, 1999.
My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001, although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous Toilet of the World page until January 17, 2002. Some time soon after that I split it into categories, and the collection has grown ever since.
In December, 2010 I registered the toilet-guru.com domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.
If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):
