When it was completed in 1889, the Eiffel Tower – the Iron Lady of Paris – was expected to last 20 years before being dismantled. One hundred and 33 years later, the tower still stands, not so much by design as by diligent maintenance.
Now, however, confidential reports leaked to the French magazine Marianne show that the monument is in poor condition and covered in rust. The tower was said to be in need of a complete overhaul, but instead only cosmetic repairs are being done for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
“If Gustave Eiffel visited the place, he would have a heart attack,” said an unnamed manager of the Marian Tower.
The 324m iron tower weighing 7300t was built for the World Exhibition in 1889. It has approximately 2.5m rivets and was built using cast iron invented in Britain during the Industrial Revolution through a process that produced high quality and -pure wrought iron by removing carbon from cast iron in the smelting process.
Eiffel, the civil engineer whose company designed and built the monument, said identifying and stopping the spread of rust was the biggest challenge to the structure’s longevity and suggested it would need to be painted every seven years. “Paint is the main ingredient in protecting a metal structure, and the care with which it is done is the only guarantee of its durability,” he wrote at the time.
The tower is undergoing a €60 million repaint in preparation for the 2024 Olympics, marking the 20th time the monument has been repainted. A third of the tower had to be removed and then two new layers applied. However, work delays caused by Covid and the presence of lead in the old paint mean that only 5% will be treated.
Experts told Marian that the job was just a cosmetic facelift and predicted the end result would be “deplorable”.
The company that oversees the tower, Sete, which is 99% owned by the town hall, is reluctant to close it for a long period of time because of the tourist revenue that would be lost. The tower receives about 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 forced closure in 2020 due to Covid resulted in a loss of €52 million in revenue.
A 2010 report said: “Sette should look again at the Eiffel Tower and come up with a completely new maintenance policy focused on testing the aging metalwork.” A second report in 2014 found the tower to have cracks and rust , and a third in 2016 found 884 errors, including 68 that were said to pose a risk to the “durability” of the structure.
On the tower’s website, Bertrand Lemoine, an architect, engineer and historian, takes a more optimistic view. He says that the enemy of iron is corrosion caused by the oxidation of iron exposed to air and water. But he says that if it is repainted, the Eiffel Tower could last forever.
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