Green water and peeling paint: We checked in on DC’s troubled Reflecting Pool
WASHINGTON – Talking about the refurbished reflecting pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, President Trump boasted last week, “We did a hell of a job.”
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He noted that the project on the National Mall, one of many makeovers he has initiated in Washington in his second term, included workers putting “a swimming pool topping, but industrial strength” on the pool’s surface.
That industrial strength has already been tested.
Almost halfway down the left side of the pool on Thursday, a partially torn piece of the “American flag blue” sealant rippled in the shallow, algae-filled water. Along the edges of the large rectangular pool, exposed white areas showed potential additional signs of decay.
“Well, it’s not very reflective,” Marcel Korner, a tourist from the Netherlands visiting the pool, told the Globe. Unaware of Trump’s beautification project, he laughed when he learned it had just been refurbished.
“I wouldn’t want to swim in it,” Korner said.
Seeing the blue piece of sealant breaking the surface, another tourist walking by simply said, “Yikes.”
Just a week after the $14.7 million project was unveiled in early June, small clumps of green algae started to appear on the water’s surface, and on Tuesday, contractors began using an ozone nanobubbling system combined with hydrogen peroxide, the Interior Department said.
In a post on X Wednesday, the department declared the pool’s water was “crystal clear.”
But on Thursday, the center of the pool was still a fluorescent green, and tourists leaned over the edge with phones out to document the scene.
Machinery whirred as self-proclaimed “pool guys” in rubber waders vacuumed the algae from the depths with hoses attached to long metal poles, and a plume of white chemicals spread from one hose submerged near the Lincoln Memorial steps.
When asked about the project, workers insisted they were vacuuming only the algae, not the paint, and they did not provide information on the specific type of algae or how it bloomed so quickly.
In the Wednesday X post, the Interior Department insisted that the nanobubbler technology would be effective in killing the algae “that has plagued every Lincoln Reflecting Pool reopening” and that workers would be “vacuuming up the dead algae resting on the bottom.”
Spokespeople for the National Park Service and the Interior Department did not immediately respond to email requests for comment.
One visitor from Montana, S. Arbizu, was in Washington to volunteer at the Great American State Fair being held on the National Mall later this month to commemorate America’s 250th birthday. She joked that Trump should patent and sell bottles of the algae, calling it “Trump’s Algae.”
Still, she was disappointed that nature had taken over the pool so soon.
“It would’ve been the first time I’d seen it in my lifetime clean,” she said.
One D.C. resident tore a small piece off from the flapping piece of blue sealant in the water Thursday before hopping on his bike to leave. He planned to show it to his kids.
“American flag blue, right?” he said.
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