contents
Paris is preparing for the 2024 Olympic Games. To this end, the city is refreshing its landmarks. This renovation work has now shown that the Eiffel Tower is in a critically bad condition.
The «Iron Lady», as the Parisians respectfully call their landmark, gets new clothes. Since it was built for the 1889 World’s Fair, the steel structure has been repainted every seven years. It changed color every time: the dark red of the opening days was followed by pale ocher yellow in 1892, later yellow-orange – brown has been dominant since the late 1960s.
The “Iron Lady” is currently getting a new coat of paint for the twentieth time. The new hue is brown-yellow, similar to gold – so appropriate for the Olympic Games. The work is expected to last three years. The painters apply 60 tons of new paint to a surface of almost 260,000 square meters of steel.
The regular change of wardrobe was already ordered by the creator Gustave Eiffel. However, engineer Eiffel wasn’t thinking about cosmetics: he wanted to protect the steel structure from rust, its worst enemy, as Eiffel himself wrote.
Reports of deficiencies in maintenance
The city of Paris, as the owner of the “Iron Lady”, apparently took these warnings too little seriously. And not just since yesterday, as the news magazine “Marianne” writes: The Eiffel Tower is in a worryingly bad condition, according to an internal report to the operating company as early as 2010. The paint shows rust and cracks everywhere, places where new rust will form.
Four years later, another report again warned of deficiencies in maintenance. Even if the bad condition of the anti-rust paint is not visible to the naked eye. As “Marianne” writes, an expertise later confirmed this finding. She identified around 900 damaged areas – 70 of which would endanger the structure in the long term.
Old paint has only been removed from about five percent of the surface
The current color change does not address these issues: the build program is behind schedule, a long pandemic-related hiatus, and additional delays. The old paint is only removed from around five percent of the surface, as prescribed by Eiffel. The rest is simply painted over so that the landmark can shine with a golden glow in time for the Olympic Games.
The renovation should be more thorough by the next change of clothes in seven years at the latest. If the rust can continue to eat away at the steel structure, there is too much at stake: the Eiffel Tower is not only the second strongest tourist attraction in Paris after the Louvre. The Eiffel Tower is the landmark and trademark not only for Paris, but quite simply for France. The “Iron Lady” is worth its weight in gold – in this sense, the tower has exactly the right color for the next few years.