It’s a lovely fountain isn’t it? Charming. Beautiful. Peaceful.
But it has a dark secret. More on that later.
Jet d’Eau is the name of the fountain, literally meaning Water Jet. Geneva.info says the fountain was built in 1886 to release pressure from a hydraulic plant but is now a picture of strength and control, not just in Geneva but in the whole country of Switzerland.
Here are more facts from Geneva.info for you.
Facts & Statistics:
Maximum height: 140 meters
Water velocity on exit: 200km/h
Pump rate: 500 liters per second
Total power of tde two pumps: 1000kW
So there we were touring the city of Geneva. No big deal. And much to our surprise, we could walk out to where the fountain was. You can’t really see it in the picture below but there’s a dog-legged walkway out to the fountain– cement with no railings.
Out we went to bath in the sun. Everyone looked like they were enjoying themselves. But people weren’t sticking around to sunbathe. They went out and went back to land. When we went out this is what we saw on the very far leg of the fountain. I thought “wow… people will sunbathe in anything out here.” But girl in her swimsuit was packing up her stuff. We were just excited to get the place to ourselves.
What we found out the dark secret was that the fountain/ water jet ROTATES. Yup. We didn’t see that written anywhere. It rotates very slowly so it isn’t super noticeable. We were fully clothed hanging out when the water started in our direction. The pictures below are what surrounded that little outcropping in the water… rocks. Everywhere. If you fell into the water you would fall into rocks.
By the time the water started coming at us, a wall of white separated us from the walkway connected to land. We couldn’t go running through the water because we could slip on the wet cement. So we had to wait it out. Closer and closer it pounded. I had never been under water of that weight. I thought it was going to wipe me off the walkway. All of my stuff was soaked. I was soaked. At one point, I scrunched into a ball to try to stay on the walkway. All around me was whitewashed. The noise of it was deafening. We were screaming to try to communicate to each other. We linked hands, trying to stay upright. I was sure that when the water cleared, my companions would be washed into the lake. We took a step at a time. When we finally made it through the wall of water, the concrete was dry, the sun was still shining and everyone else was dry. Everyone knew better except us crazy kids who they probably thought wanted to be in it.
At the end of the day, we didn’t lose anything into the water except one shoe which found its way into a crack floating under a dock. Not accessible.
Bottom line: Geneva tried to kill us, but we survived!
