Now, however, confidential reports leaked to the French magazine Marianne suggest that the monument is in poor condition and has rust. The tower needs a complete overhaul, it is claimed, but instead it is only being given a cosmetic makeover for the 2024 Olympics in Paris. “If Gustave Eiffel visited the place he would have a heart attack,” an unnamed manager at the tower told Marianne. The 324-meter high, 7,300-ton iron tower was built for the World’s Fair of 1889. It has approximately 2.5 meters of rivets and was made using pit iron, invented in Britain during the Industrial Revolution through a process that produced high-quality and cleaner wrought iron by removing carbon from cast iron during the smelting process. Before opening, it was given four coats of red lead paint, now banned but considered the best anti-corrosion agent. Eiffel, the civil engineer whose firm designed and built the monument, said spotting and stopping the spread of rust was the biggest challenge to the structure’s longevity and suggested it would need painting every seven years. “Paint is the essential ingredient in protecting a metal structure, and the care with which it is done is the only guarantee of its longevity,” he wrote at the time. “The most important thing is to prevent the rust from starting.” The tower is undergoing a €60 million repaint in preparation for the 2024 Olympics, the 20th time the monument has been repainted. A third of the tower had to be stripped and then two new layers applied. However, work delays caused by Covid and the presence of worrying levels of lead in the old paint mean only 5% will be treated. Experts told Marianne the project was just a cosmetic facelift and predicted the end result would be “deplorable”. They say the tower needs to be completely stripped to the metal, repaired and repainted, and that painting over the old paint makes the corrosion worse. The company that oversees the tower, Sete, which is 99% owned by the town hall, is reluctant to close it for any length of time because of the lost tourism revenue. The tower receives around 6 million visitors in a typical year, making it the fourth most visited cultural site in France after Disneyland, the Louvre and the Palace of Versailles. Its closure due to Covid in 2020 resulted in a loss of revenue of €52 million. A report in 2010 said: “Sete should take another look at the Eiffel Tower and come up with a completely new maintenance policy centered on testing the aging metalwork.” A second report in 2014 by Expiris, a specialist paint company, found the tower cracked and rusted and only 10% of the newer paint on the tower adhered to the structure. “Even if the general state of corrosion protection looks good to the eye, this can be deceiving,” he said. “It is unrealistic to envisage applying a new coat of paint which can only increase the risk of a complete lack of adhesion.” Bernard Giovannoni, head of Expiris and author of the 2014 report, told Marianne: “I have been working on the tower for several years. In 2014 I felt there was an extremely urgent need to tackle erosion.” He said he had advised that the tower “be stripped and repainted”. A third report in 2016 found 884 defects, including 68 that were said to compromise the “durability” of the structure. Each of the lesions was photographed, numbered and classified according to severity. An expert told Marianne that while the original layers of paint were still solid “and continue to protect the metal in many places”, the new partial renovation would not address the high levels of lead or rust and risked making the tower’s condition worse. . “At best it will be mostly useless, but at worst it will exacerbate defects in the existing paint layer and lead to corrosion,” they said. On the tower’s website, Bertrand Lemoine, an architect, engineer and historian, takes a more optimistic view. He says the enemy of iron is corrosion, caused by the oxidation of iron exposed to air and water. But he says that if the Eiffel Tower is rechristened it can last forever.
