Paris Flood

Paris Flood



Paris Flood

Introduction

The winter of 1909-1910 in northern France was cold, windy, and above all wet. For weeks, cities and towns were inundated by rain and rising rivers, but no place suffered as much as Paris. On January, the river reached a maximum height of feet above its regular level, nearly covering the statues of four soldiers on the Pont de l'Alma by which most Parisians gauged the height of the water. Each of them, including the Zouave (the only one that remains on the bridge today), was up to his neck. By that point, the rushing, icy water swelled the river's channel, pushing up into the streets of the capital from the thoroughly saturated soil below. All along the length of the river that runs through the heart of Paris, from wealthy areas like the Champs-Elysées to working-class districts such as Javel, the Seine invaded dozens of streets and thousands of homes and businesses. The platforms at the grand Orsay train station sat feet under water.

The basement in the Louvre began to fill, making curators fear that many of the priceless treasures in the collection would be lost forever. In the midst of the emergency, the National Assembly met in the dark because the electricity at the Palais Bourbon had gone out. An observer stood amazed alongside a crowd that had gathered on one of the city's embankments and watched what he called, with only a bit of sensationalism, the “headlong rush of the silent yellow river that carried with it logs and barrels, broken furniture, the carcasses of animals, and perhaps sometimes a corpse, all racing madly to the sea” (Vale, 2005). In some of the oldest and most historic parts of Paris, boats floated through the streets where pedestrians, coaches, and automobiles had traveled just days before. After much soaking, many of the roadways that lay under water began to cave in and collapse, leaving behind only rubble once the waters finally receded for good by early March. “The scene was indescribably desolate,” as this same witness put it, “a long row of cheerless houses three feet deep in water, as far as the eye could see.” In the end, the number of such “cheerless houses” in Paris that were evacuated totaled some. Thousands of inhabitants of the entire region went weeks without electricity and basic services, and when the officials tabulated the total cost of the devastation, it reached approximately million francs (Rosenheim, 2006).

Suburban villages, both upstream and downstream, were extremely hard hit. But within the city limits, the flood was particularly problematic because of the higher density of people and buildings. From the perspective of urban planners and officials, the flood was a disaster. Although only a portion of the city was submerged, much of the infrastructure on which Parisians relied fell apart. To many at the time, the flood demonstrated the failure of the modern technological city's ability to cope with the primeval forces of ...