Eiffel Tower painters defy danger

The Eiffel Tower at the end of March 2009. Note the green netting on the upper parts of the structure. Painting work on the monument began at the end of March and is expected to take up to 22 months to complete. PHOTO: Dennis D. Jacobs

And you thought house painting was a hassle.

Imagine having to paint the entire Eiffel Tower.

Talk about a tall order.

At the end of March, 25 painters from a Greek company began painting the most-visited monument in the world with a special brown paint. The value of the contract is €4 million (about $5.5 million) to cover a surface area of roughly 820,000 square feet. Sixty tons of paint will be needed to complete the task, along with five acres of protective netting, 30 miles of security cords, 5,000 sanding discs, and 1,500 brushes.

The job is expected to take 22 months to complete. The tower is repainted every seven years. This is the 19th time it has been repainted.

This is the fifth time repainting the tower for Aderito Dos Santos Baptista. He first worked on the Eiffel Tower in 1981 and he told France’s Le Figaro newspaper that he knows the structure “like the back of my hands.”

He acknowledges that he thinks about the danger of the task every morning when he puts on his harness, but says once he is on the tower, he forgets about it, and instead focuses on the silence, the light, and the view. Unlike other jobs he has worked on, people are constantly taking photos of the Eiffel Tower, and this gives him a special pride in his work.

The danger is real. One worker reportedly fell into a tree from the first stage of the tower during the last repainting in 2001.

The safety of the painters is taken seriously. They received 10 days of training from a professional mountain climber prior to beginning their work on the tower.

The entire tower is painted by hand with round brushes. No spray paint is used. To give the tower its uniform bronze appearance, three different shades of brown are actually used, going from darkest near the ground to lightest near the top. The paint is manufactured in Finland and is used exclusively for the Eiffel Tower.

When construction on the tower was completed in 1889, the structure was originally painted red. Later, it was painted shades of orange and yellow, but eventually it was determined that brown stands out best against the Paris sky.

The old layers of paint have never been removed. It’s estimated that about one quarter of the paint previously applied remains each time the tower is repainted. As a result, the accumulation of paint has added weight to the tower – about 700 tons, according to some estimates. For now, engineers say that is not a problem. The tower can support that weight, especially since it is fairly evenly dispersed. It could pose a problem sometime down the road, however, which would require an extensive paint removal effort. That might force the tower to close to the public for an extended period of time – perhaps years. 

Not repainting the tower is not an option. The paint is the only thing keeping the iron structure from rusting and consequently crumbling.

Built for the 1889 World’s Fair, marking the centennial of the French Revolution, the tower was only designed to stand for 20 years. It was initially saved from demolition by the advent of a new technology – radio. The tower, the tallest structure in the world until 1930, was an ideal place for radio transmitters. Today, of course, dismantling this icon of Paris for any reason would be unthinkable.

“We will most likely never realize the full importance of painting the tower,” Gustave Eiffel wrote in 1900. “It is the essential element in the conservation of metal works and the more meticulous the paint job, the longer the tower shall endure.”

So let’s hope Aderito Dos Santos Baptista and his colleagues do a good job.