Forget about the floating tires. You can spot those in the water
even in clean cities around the world. What gob-smacks you as you
approach a canal near the Rio international airport, a body of water
that flows into the city’s Guanabara Bay – home of the 2016
Olympics sailing venue — is the smell. It’s a gaseous stench:
inhale it at your stomach’s own risk. There’s also the sludge, so
thick you slip on it. And the sheer mass of stuff: Christmas
ornaments, milk cartons, cookie packaging, clothes sitting in the
stew. Then there are all the insidious things you can’t always see,
like super bacteria!
Why is Guanabara Bay in such dire shape? “For the past 30 years,
we’ve invested very, very little money in it,” says Paulo Rosman,
a professor of coastal engineering at the Federal University of Rio
de Janeiro. He says some $800 million has been spent in bay cleanup
since 1990. In contrast, Maracana stadium, home of the opening and
closing ceremonies, was given a $400 million facelift ahead of the
2014 World Cup.
Indeed, falling far short of their promise, made seven years ago,
to clean up 80% of the pollution in Guanabara Bay. It is among one of the
biggest failures of the Rio Olympic organizers. While the water is
said to be cleaner than it was before Rio won the bid for these
Summer Games, the pollution is still putting athletes competing in
the bay and other bodies of water around the city — sailors, open
water swimmers, rowers, triathletes — at real risk. An Associated Press
investigation in early August found that Rio’s water is “as
filthy as ever, contaminated with raw human sewage teeming with
dangerous viruses and bacteria.”
To Rosman, the promise to clean the waterways was all but
guaranteed to fail. He says the reason is social more than
scientific. “Everyone looks out into the water and says it’s a
problem,” says Rosman. “Put your back to the bay, and you’ll
see the problem. It’s as simple as that. There’s no magic in
that.”
What you see when you turn away from the bay are the favelas
housing millions of Rio’s poor residents. These impoverished
neighborhoods, scattered atop the city’s hills and mountains, often
lack basic sanitary services, like plumbing and garbage pickup.
Without these essentials, waste flows into water. “People there are
fighting for survival,” says Rosman. “They’re worried about
quantity of life, not quality. They go to the bathroom and have to
use plastic bags to clean up. Where to these plastic bags end up? The
bay. It’s a tragedy.”
Officials did their best to put a positive front on the problem. The
water, while polluted, does often look clean. Drier winter weather in
Rio recently has also helped because there has been no torrential rain
to flush human waste from the hillside slums that surround the city into
the lagoon.
