Paris Residents Threaten To Exhaust In The Sea River Protesting Waste Ahead Of The 2024 Olympics

River See Paris/UNSPLASH/J Shim

JAKARTA - The Paris 2024 Olympics are only a month away, but there is still a bad controversy over one of the places where the event focuses on the River See.

After months of testing showing high levels of bacteria from waste and wastewater, residents fed up with river pollution just weeks before Olympic athletes prepare to jump in and threaten to do mass defecation in protest.

Reporting from CBS News, the website appears using the #JeChieDansLaSeineLe23Juin viral hashtag, which translates to, "I will go to the Seine River on June 23".

Google's search for the phrase directs people to the website, represented by emoji "" in search engines.

The site repeated the sentence, and made direct ridicule at French President Emmanuel Macron and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, both of whom had vowed to swim before the Olympics to prove the Sea River was safe.

"Because after putting us in the dirt, it's up to them to shower in our dirt," the website said in a statement. It is also equipped with a calculator that allows users to put how far they live from downtown Paris, and then calculate when they have to defecate in the river so that the garbage ends in the heart of the capital on June 23.

Local news outlet ActuParis said the protests emerged from a joke after Hidalgo and other officials pledged at the end of May to keep the river inundated during open water events during the Summer Olympics.

The latest test found there was still an alarming acterial level'. According to ActuParis, a computer engineer was behind the viral protest idea, and he didn't seem sure how much action would actually be taken on Sunday.

"At first, the goal was to make a joke, by throwing this ironic hashtag," the unnamed inciter told the outlet.

"In the end, are people really going to throw garbage in the SEine River, or carry out militant actions? Nothing is excluded."

Pollution in the River Seeine has been a major debate ahead of the Olympics. The French government has spent nearly $1.5 billion to try to clear the river so that it can be inundated, despite the wet weather complicating the effort.

Officials announced test results from mid-June showed the level of E. coli and Enterocci bacteria in the river, although Axios reported Parisian official Marc Guillaume expressed confidence the planned measures for the river would go ahead as planned.

In May, the Surfrider charity conducted a test that found contaminants were at a higher level than the sports federation allowed, with one reading on Paris' iconic Alexandre III bridge showing a three-fold higher rate than the maximum limit permitted by triathlon federations and open water swimming.

French news agency AFP said. Testing during the first eight days of June shows continued contamination.