President Donald Trump’s nearly $15 million directive to ensure the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool glistens a pristine, deep, “American flag blue” has hit a snag: The water is green.
Now refilled after a weeks-long project to paint the bottom of the pool, an algal bloom has coated the basin with a layer of gunk thick enough to write in.
On Tuesday, crews were working to get the reflecting pool back to reflecting. National Park Service staff poured hydrogen peroxide into one corner of the pool — the chemical can be temporarily “pretty effective” at killing off bacteria, according to Hans W. Paerl, a marine and environmental science professor at University of North Carolina Chapel-Hill. Later in the day, that area of the pool was noticeably a milky blue.
Multiple staff could be seen wading through the shallow water, clearing the bottom of the pool inch by inch. Two NPS crewmembers told NOTUS that they were vacuuming the algae from the bottom of the pool.
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NPS and the Department of Interior did not respond to an emailed question from NOTUS about whether or not they planned to clean the whole pool that way.
Also on Tuesday, a contractor was injecting ozone — which is highly effective at killing algal blooms — directly into the water from equipment parked on the edge of the pool. That process has been ongoing for several days.
Renovating the reflecting pool was one of Trump’s “beautification initiatives” ahead of celebrations for America’s 250th birthday. Trump’s critics attacked the project as a desecration of a national monument — and a symbol of Trump wasting taxpayer dollars on his own aesthetic preferences. One D.C. nonprofit unsuccessfully attempted to stop the renovations with a lawsuit.
When the painting was done, Trump championed the pool as an early success of his plans for the city — one that includes a giant Arc de Triomphe-esque archway and gold-guilded horse statues.
“Everybody’s looking at that reflecting pool, they can’t believe it reflects,” Trump said last week, soon before the algae took over. “We used a dark blue; it’s called American flag blue. I wanted to go light, but they said, “Sir, light doesn’t reflect and light shows leaves and garbage.”
The park service has said that the flux of algae is residual from water in the pipes while the pool was drained. The Interior Department spent $1.7 million on a contract to coat the pool with nanobubbles to prevent algal growth, which it says will keep the algae at bay once the pool is cleaned.
“The nanobubble system will inject ozone-impregnated nanobubbles into the Reflecting Pool water,” an Interior Department spokesperson said. “The nanobubbles will not rise to the surface and burst; instead, the nanobubbles will diffuse throughout the entire water column like a gas.”
The Interior Department also defended the renovations by taking a swipe at the Obama administration, which faced a similar algae bloom in 2012 after a multi-million dollar renovation.
“Unlike under Obama and Biden, the National Park Service is actually maintaining the beautifully completed Reflecting Pool,” the agency spokesperson said.
As NPS worked to clean up the pool, tourists and Washingtonians moved around them to see one of the most popular tourist attractions in town. Some NOTUS spoke to were unaware of the drama surrounding the shallow pool. Others were more critical.
“So many words come to mind. Fiasco, I guess,” Frank S., a D.C. resident who declined to give his full name, told NOTUS. “It just seems typical of this administration. They try to do something and it always works out crazy.”
Sonia, a visitor from Pennsylvania who also declined to give her last name, suggested the NPS deploy fish into the pond to eat the algae.
Nichole Gerlach, visiting from Rhode Island, stopped by to see the pool, something she has wanted to do since she saw the movie “Forrest Gump.” She told NOTUS that while the pool wasn’t perfect, the algae wasn’t disrupting her experience.
“If you look at that, it looks pretty,” she said pointing to the length of the pool.
“You just can’t look down, that’s all,” she said, gesturing at pool’s edge, where ducks were drifting through the film of green algae on the pool’s surface.
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