President Donald Trump’s costly attempt to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has blown up in his face, with the Daily Beast reporting that he is now taking drastic emergency steps to fix the algae bloom before July 4.
As part of his broader campaign to renovate and remodel Washington D.C., to his own personal taste, Trump undertook a $13.1 million project to paint the city’s iconic Reflecting Pool a new shade of blue, which he insisted would make it more “patriotic.” After rushing through the process and awarding a no-bid contract to a Virginia firm for the job, the project was completed last and promptly went sideways when the pool became infested with a massive bloom of green algae, making the watery landmark so green that it could be seen from planes thousands of feet in the air.
Still hoping to have an “American Flag Blue” Reflecting Pool ready for the country’s 250th birthday next month, Trump’s National Parks Service is now in crisis mode. As the Daily Beast noted in a Thursday report, the government is “desperately seeking additional workers to help address the issue,” and has upgraded the situation internally to a “regional and national priority.”
“An email addressed to National Park Service employees and reviewed by the outlet stated that officials were working on ‘critical pre-July 4th operational needs’ and were seeking ‘additional personnel to assist immediately,'” the report explained. “Specifically, workers are needed to support ‘scrubbing and pump out operations’ at the pool. They are being asked to work 12-hour shifts starting this week and continuing through the weekend.”
It continued later: “The algae bloom appeared within 24 hours of the end of renovation work earlier this month. Workers have already been deployed to vacuum algae from the pool and disperse hydrogen peroxide into the water, but the algae and resulting green tint to the water have remained.”
Different theories have been floated around to try and explain what is going on with this sudden algae bloom. Some have suggested that the light waves reflected off the new blue paint job are more conducive to producing algae, while Cochise Wanzer II, president of the Pool Service Company in Arlington, Virginia, told the Associated Press that the development was wholly unsurprising, given the type of water used.
“What do you expect?” Wanzer said. “You’re basically taking natural, untreated river water, pumping it in and expecting it to do something different from what it would do out in the open.”
Wanzer also added that the navy blue paint job made the pool “nice and dark,” increasing the pool’s temperature to a level at which algae grows better.
The Trump administration, as the Daily Beast noted, has attempted to defuse criticism of the situation, claiming that the algae bloom is typical of the immediate aftermath of such a project and being handled, while also taking the opportunity, unsurprisingly, to hail Trump as an “expert builder” while denigrating Barack Obama and Joe Biden.