The Eiffel Tower, like France, is in need of major repairs
French magazine Marianne cites confidential reports showing that the Eiffel Tower is deteriorating and is full of rust. The tower is in desperate need of a complete repair, not just a cosmetic makeover.
"If Gustave Eiffel visited this place, he would have a heart attack," a tower executive told Marianne.
The Eiffel Tower, nicknamed "La dame de fer", was built from 1887 to 1889 as the centerpiece of the 1889 Universal Exhibition. The engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower, expected the lattice structure to wrought iron lasted only two decades, so there were no huge problems with the temporal quality of the materials.
The tower is still standing more than 130 years later, thanks to routine maintenance and periodic protective paint. Now, however, the 7,300-ton structure, with over 2.5 million rivets, is in poor condition and in need of a complete restoration.
A € 60 million project is underway to repaint the tower ahead of the 2024 Olympics. This will be the twentieth time the structure has been repainted since its inception.
“Paint is the essential ingredient to protect a metal structure and the care with which it is done is the only guarantee of its longevity,” wrote Eiffel at the time. “The most important thing is to prevent the onset of rust”.
Experts told Marianne that the current work is just a cosmetic facelift, replacing some corroded pieces where possible, but as early as 2014 a report from Expiris paint experts found that the tower had cracks and rust problems.
“While the general state of the corrosion protection looks good to the eye, this can be misleading,” said Expiris at the time. “It is not possible to foresee the application of a new layer of paint which can only increase the risk of a total lack of adhesion”.
Bernard Giovannoni, head of Expiris, told Marianne: “I have been working on the tower for several years. In 2014 I felt it was extremely urgent to tackle corrosion ”.
Another 2016 report found that the tower had 884 defects, including 68 that could compromise the "durability" of the structure. In the end, the Eiffel Tower looks more and more like France, that is, it is an imposing structure, but corroded, decrepit and which, if not repaired, could collapse.
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The article La Tour Eiffel, like France, needs deep repairs comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/la-tour-eiffel-come-la-francia-ha-bisogno-di-profonde-riparazioni/ on Tue, 05 Jul 2022 14:26:32 +0000.