Paris would run out of emergency food and water within a week, says report
Paris would only have enough food and water to cope for between five and seven days in the event of an emergency, according to a new report into the city's ability to survive.
Together with police, Paris city hall launched investigations two years ago to discover how long the 2.1 million people who live in the capital could go without vital supplies.
In a study published this week, urbanism experts at the Atelier Parisien d'Urbanisme (Apur) found the city would could last a week at the most – slightly longer, in fact, than previously estimated.
"Supply disruption had been identified as a major risk, but the authorities had no reliable data on food resilience," Pénélope Komites, deputy mayor in charge of resilience, told French news agency AFP after the publication of Apur's analysis on Tuesday.
"We were talking about three days' self-sufficiency without knowing where this figure came from. Knowing that it is between five and seven days is a bit more reassuring," she said.
Emergency food stores
Apur estimates that with an average of 1.45 kg of food eaten per person per day, 3,090 tonnes of food are needed to feed the 2,146,000 residents of Paris and provide 6.5 million meals a day.
Its survey first looked at where food is stored in normal times. Researchers found three main places: household cupboards (containing between 36 hours and five days of reserves on average), shops and community catering (two days of reserves) and food logistics warehouses (also two days).
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