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The multimillion-dollar renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was done with highly toxic materials.
The contractor that the Trump administration hired used products by the popular truck bed coating company Rhino Linings, according to the company’s website. But a closer examination of the materials used indicates that they could cause serious harm to the local wildlife that frequent the 6.5-million gallon basin.
A barrel of “RHINO 405 A Thixotropic High Viscosity Epoxy Resin” was spotted by the pool during the restoration process. According to an OSHA data sheet, the chemical is “toxic to aquatic life with long lasting effects.” It’s also a strong irritant capable of causing allergic reactions.
It’s only been a couple of weeks since the administration finished its renovation and refilled the pool, but already visitors have noticed and documented areas of the pool lining that are peeling and sloughing off.
Several dead ducks have also been spotted in and around the pool, adding to the massive brouhaha.
Records indicate that the Trump administration spent at least $14.7 million renovating the Reflecting Pool—a project that was, apparently, all for naught. (As well as a far cry from the president’s original promise of a $1.8 million price tag.) The money was spent in an apparently futile effort to rid the premises of a relentless algal bloom. That, too, has already returned to the pool, mere weeks after the monument’s reopening.
Fixing the Reflecting Pool is a headache that’s plagued pretty much every administration since its construction in 1923, because what makes the Reflecting Pool beautiful is exactly what makes it so difficult to maintain. The pool’s expansive length is possible due to the use of multiple large concrete slabs as its bottom. But those slabs are also prone to serious, structural leaks, which require the White House to replace roughly 16 million gallons of water each year. And the pool’s shallow depth—which creates its mirror-like appearance—also detracts from the pool’s health by creating a breeding ground for algal blooms that turn the water green.
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It’s almost amazing how little thought was put into this project, they have made the worst possible decision at every point for over a century.
In the 1910s, they built it with no pilings whatsoever on marshland, just slapping down asphalt on raw ground and then placing tiles over the asphalt. The pool was filled with potable drinking water from the city water supply and then that water was left to stagnate. The only things that removed the water were leaks and evaporation so it still had to be manually topped off on a regular basis, like you’d do with a crappy above ground pool in a residential backyard. There were no walking paths around it or anything, it was basically just grass up to the edges and people would walk all around it so it became just a giant mud puddle of desire paths that ended up significantly worsening erosion. It sunk a measurable amount every year, as the ground sought to reclaim this affront to god.
Between 2009 and 2012, the entire thing was ripped out and completely replaced. They put wood pilings into the river clay so that it had literally anything supporting at all. They added walking paths so it wasn’t just mud. They connected it to the Tidal Basin to circulate the water and prevent stagnation. All of this totally fixed everything! …Just kidding, it had a severe algae bloom less than a week after reopening, killed a bunch of ducks, and had to be drained again.
At this point, the federal government was informed that there was no possible way the reflecting pool could be fixed, and the only option to prevent it from being a yearly disaster would be complete and permanent removal without replacement. There has been a concern requiring further intervention every single year since this point. In 2017, there was a schistosome outbreak in the pool which necessitated a complete draining of the pool. From then on, they’ve just been throwing chemicals and ozone at it and failing every single time.
This year they drained it to patch up the cracks and holes with this epoxy resin then sprayed the wrong type of blue polyurea elastomer over the granite and concrete bottom, again, treating it like a crappy above ground pool. Darkening the bottom of the pool from white to blue encourages algae growth by capturing more heat. Polyurea also notably does not adhere to granite, the material of which the majority of the pool is constructed. They then drove a motorcade across the pool and filled it with water before allowing the elastomer to cure. They installed nanobubblers around the rim which they then immediately removed because they were ugly and they didn’t want them seen during the UFC matches. They dumped a bunch of hydrogen peroxide into the pool, which also further damaged that elastomer and caused it to peel off of the concrete parts, too.
What they need to do is abandon the idea of just having a biologically dead reflecting pool. You wouldn’t get algae if you had plants in there competing for the nutrients! You could totally make this a big koi pond, just make it a little deeper, add some rocks and stuff, fill it with “America’s Goldfish”, and put some staff aquarium people in charge of maintaining it.
But then it wouldn’t reflect the god penis
Maybe Shubunkin or Comet goldfish? I’m not really a Fish Knower, sadly.
They would need to use floating plants and epiphytes exclusively or establish a few inches of substrate across the bottom like a fish tank because the pool is supported from below, so they can’t just open it to dirt. It’s also only about 18 inches deep at the edges and 30 inches deep at the center. You can actually see the V-shaped trench in images taken from above.
Perhaps one of our fish tank experts could weigh in on what they would do with a 6750000-gallon rimless shallow tank.
Amazing. Reflecting pools have been a thing for millennia. It should be a solved problem but the yanks are too backwards and primitive to make it work.
The problem is that you really just can’t build this kind of thing right on the fucking swamp
But Americans love to do what is impossible for good reasons
I’ve been hostile about caring about this but that was an interesting write up. Thanks
I think the liberal narrative of it being a brand new, solely Trump-caused disaster of vanity is incredibly lame. It’s been a rolling nightmare for over a hundred years, and I think that’s emblematic of the way that liberals just ignore all of the other problems of the US and blame it on Orange Man.
schistosome
I had to look that up.
Also called bilharzia. any elongated trematode of the genus Schistosoma, parasitic in the blood vessels of humans and other mammals; a blood fluke.
They’re also responsible for swimmer’s itch!
Honestly, I get this giddy Colin Robinson energy every time Trump touches one of these pieces of DC vanity project infrastructure. The hate I feel for American Civil Religion and the liberals that venerate it is boundless.
Are you sure it was only starting in 2009 that they started adding walking paths? I visited the Lincoln Memorial in the mid-00s and I distinctly remember there being pavement around the reflecting pool.
Photograph from Wikimedia Commons, taken 28 July 2007
There are desire paths visible on both sides where the grass has died due to foot traffic, and visible on the opposite side is the WWII memorial, the Washington Monument, and cars on 17th St. between them which I still think is hilariously tacky and deeply American.
There was concrete only on the Lincoln Monument side that allowed you to walk up to the reflecting pool, which is probably what you’re remembering.
The elites want you to know this: the ducks at the park are no longer free
And I’m proud to be an American
Where at least I know I’m free
And I won’t forget the ducks who died
Who gave that right to me<Steinbeck quote here>
“But let the greater villain loose, who took the commons from the goose”
It’s gonna be a hard time foraging at industrial parks this summer.
No jobs, no hope, no ducks.
I don’t know shit about algae, but I don’t think duck carcasses are conducive to clear blue reflective surfaces.
A group of geese is called a flocculant
One time I was hungover in NOLA and sat with my then-partner on a bench in front of a pond and just somehow rattled off a ton of duck facts.
I never once have been able to recall as much about ducks as I did that day.
You were Duck Dharma for a day.
-–
It’s a bad Blue Oyster Cult joke.
Donald Bruce Roeser, known professionally as Buck Dharma, is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He is the sole constant member of hard rock band Blue Öyster Cult since the group’s formation in 1967. He wrote and sang vocals on several of the band’s best-known hits, including “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”, “Godzilla” and “Burnin’ for You”.
Oh shit good one
I don’t know if it’s wise to encourage me to make more dad jokes.
I appreciate you knowing that your reference would be so obscure that it needed an explanation much longer than the joke itself.
RHINO RESIN, that’s right folks, it’s republican in name ONLY
Honestly most accurate reflection of the US I’ve ever seen. An exorbitant and self-aggrandizing monument built on toxin and grift that absorbs the very life around it and gives nothing in return, easily remediated by a collective effort rendered impossible to achieve by the hands of its own stewards.
Who needs creativity when reality itself does the writing for you?
I don’t fucking get it.
Empty the thing, put 50 people in it, and scrub the shit out of it? That thing needs to be scrubbed, manually, no amount of pouring more and more chemicals into it is ever going to solve the problem, it’s just going to create more and more problems.
The thing needs emptying, fixing manually by hand, repainting, then refilling. It also needs a filtration system and a daily dose of chlorine to keep it from filling with algae again.
This is how boomer minded people think the world works. There is always a quick fix. First chemicals don’t work? Get more, get variety. Double down. Don’t stop that would admit defeat.
Fox killing your chickens? Don’t evaluate. Just kill the fox. It still happening? Kill all foxes in a 3 mile radius. Etc
Nothing matters other then what they want. And want they want is a quick easy fit. If they throw money at it, that means it should work without them having to do the work.
Brilliant. Here’s $16.4M to fix it.
So anyway, they tried that. They started filtering and constantly ozonating it in 2012 and it has not worked at all.
They tried doubling the maximum safe level of ozone, and that still didn’t work.
They added microbubblers, went “ew these look dumb,” and removed them for a mere 36 hours during the UFC fights by which point it became unrecoverable.
Here’s my proposal: install a heat pump to keep the pool a cool 50f.
OR custom shade balls with a mirror finish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shade_ball
Scrubbing doesn’t fix the base ecological conditions
If they add some water slides it could be a nice public swimming pool
It’s actually kind of incredible how they have fucked this up in every conceivable way. Like, it isn’t often I look at something and think “wow, I could’ve done a better job than this.” but this is one of those times for sure.
It is amazing how bad a jump they’re doing. They didn’t even fucking google before they started or after they began work. That’s a serious commitment to the bit.
Did they actually listen to my advice to fill the thing with resin?
If they do fill it with resin - they need to make it gold-colored. The social media jokes will be instant and merciless. Plus - Trump’s cronies will royally fuck up the job so the color fades quickly so it does look like piss. Trump will then send out a crew in the middle of the night to remove the piss pool with jackhammers. But the fucking idiots won’t think to put up high walls first so people can’t see what they’re doing.
The sound will be an auditory Bat Signal for libs in the DC area. At least one lib will investigate probably within the hour. Social media jokes will mushroom again and be even more merciless. At that point Trump will be apoplectic. Ideally - Inshallah - he’ll give himself a stroke over the piss pool.
I’m just saying that filling it with mercury would solve the algae problem and make it very reflective
I’d advise to put the ducks back in the pool after the resin has fully cured.
Sixteen. Million. Gallons. Per year!
If they just did literally anything that’s been proven to work before this would be fine.
I’m glad lake karachay fan club is still going
