They cover 2,600 km of galleries, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day: they are the sewer workers of Paris. This intervention team is defined as “the sanitation firefighters”. Their mission: “Collect and transport wastewater, recover lost items, solve the problems of bad smells, congestion. »Equipped with full suits and protective masks to block the inhalations of toxic gases present in the sewers, the 36 officers find their way through a map and the street names indicated on the walls of the pipes.
These agents cannot work more than 6.40 hours a day: “If we exceed this limit, we put ourselves in danger and we expose ourselves to various problems. We have a reduced life expectancy of seven years compared to a reference population. »Follow the emergency response unit of the Paris sewers in the video of our partner Brut.
