On the construction site of the Seine water storage and treatment basin, aimed at making the river cleaner for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, June 15, 2023. ANNE-CHRISTINE POUJOULAT / AFP
These are two crucial projects among the major works launched in Ile-de-France: the Eole project, which aims to extend the RER E, and the Austerlitz basin, supposed to clean up the water of the Seine from here to the Olympic Games. (OG) and Paralympics. They have in common a building major, the Fayat construction group, and each having been the scene of a dramatic accident.
In March 2020, sent alone to the roof of a construction site in Pantin (Seine-Saint-Denis), from his first week of internship in a subsidiary of Fayat, Jérémy Wasson, 21, student at the Special School of Public Works , made a fatal fall while passing through a hopper – a hole left in the ground awaiting development – poorly protected.
On June 16, 2023, it was Amara Dioumassy, a 51-year-old mason in another subsidiary of the same group, who died hit by a truck on a construction site along the Seine where the security measures left something to be desired. A new accident which appalled Frédéric Wasson, Jérémy’s father. “I still don’t feel that our son’s death served any purpose and that Fayat changed anything in his security processes. The construction company continues to receive trainees from my son’s school, while the labor inspector has noted a lack of training and safety”he is indignant. Contacted several times, Fayat did not follow up.
“Ambition to set an example”
These two deaths have not officially mourned either the Grand Paris Express sites – which must deliver 200 kilometers of new metro lines by 2030 – or those of the Olympic Games. Despite their respective importance, the places where Jérémy Wasson and Amara Dioumassy worked are not, in fact, labeled as such, to the chagrin of the young man’s father.
Because these two colossal operations benefit from specific treatment concerning the safety of employees. “The challenge is to have exemplary Olympics in terms of working conditions, to match France’s ambition to set an example for these Games”recalls, at each of his press conferences, Gaëtan Rudant, director of the regional and interdepartmental management of the economy, employment, labor and solidarity of Ile-de-France.
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The Olympics are a project “exceptional”, which requires “Excellence and Exemplary”also repeats the Olympic works delivery company (Solideo), responsible for project management of all Paris 2024 construction sites.
A “social charter” in sixteen points was notably signed by the main trade unions and employers’ organisations. An advisory committee meets once a quarter to oversee its implementation, bringing together local authorities, employee and employer representatives. It is co-chaired by the former secretary general of the CGT Bernard Thibault and Dominique Carlac’h, from Medef.
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