Bad weather in Marseille: after the garbage collectors’ strike, heavy rains drag waste to the sea – Franceinfo

The heavy rains which fell in the South-East in recent days did not spare Marseille, Monday, October 4. Already affected by a strike by garbage collectors (now over), the city is therefore faced with another problem: that of seeing a lot of waste carried by the water to the beaches and to the sea.

Throughout the city, garbage cans are still littering the streets. This is the case in the district of La Valbarelle, in the city’s 11th arrondissement, and cThis is partly what blocked the water drains. The garbage collectors’ strike – which ended on Friday 1 October – therefore still has strong consequences. Nadine, who lives in the neighborhood, has trouble understanding: “Leaving the trash cans like that for a while is still abused. Indeed, they demonstrate, it is their right, but the trash cans must be collected, after a while, because at the sanitary level it is not great. ” For the mayor of the city, Benoît Payan, the metropolis should have anticipated the weather alert and urgently collect the waste accumulated during the eight days of the strike.

For the association Clean my creeks, it is even an ecological disaster. Eric Akopian is the president of this youth association which organizes waste collection hikes: “What worries us is that there is a lot of waste that we will not have the ‘chance’ to recover. All this waste that we see, it ends up in the Mediterranean, in our fish, in our plates. And us, that’s what makes us drunk. It’s that once again, in Marseille, we are struggling to give a good image and there, in 48 hours, everything collapses. “

In the coming days, pickups will therefore be organized on the beaches to try to remove some of these tons of waste.