Of Trump's corrupt vanity projects, the reflecting pool fiasco is actually one of the less costly. But its very public failure on what amounts to the front yard of US democracy has sparked bigtime disparagement and disrespect for its architect.
The Reflecting Pool now evokes the joy of a Green Bay Packers victory. Or a high-school prank. Or St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago.It most certainly is not the gleaming American-flag blue that Trump’s repainting of the pool was supposed to produce. That project—the one that cost taxpayers at least $16.4 million and came with a nanobubbling system that promised to kill off algae growth—is hidden under 18 to 30 inches of swamp water dense with scraggly plumes of algae.
“Yeah, it’s gross!” said one woman passing by.
“Quite green,” remarked another.
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So it’s come to this: A nation launched on the Founding Fathers’ grand dreams about democracy—one that survived a civil war and foreign attacks, that endured depressions and recessions and assassinations—is celebrating its semiquincentennial by watching to see whether we can clean the water in a century-old concrete pool.
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ll of this was utterly predictable. Trump undertook this transformation during the hottest part of the year, when algae flourish, and he made the cement dark blue, which retains even more heat, turning the shallow pool into an algae incubator.
“Algae, particularly blue-green algae, like it hot. So this time of year is their optimal growth period. It’s sort of Biology 101,” Hans Paerl, a professor of marine and environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina, told me. “This is not rocket science.” Don Anderson, the director of the U.S. National Office for Harmful Algal Blooms at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told me that the shallow water in warm weather created the perfect conditions for algae to flourish, and he’s baffled why no one appeared to anticipate that, either by using water with fewer of the nutrients that help algae grow, or by sealing the system to prevent residual algae from seeping back into the pool.
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Again, all of this was avoidable, Wayne Carmichael, a professor emeritus of biological sciences at Wright State University, told me. “The rush to get it done combined with not using a company that understood pool-water management, plus a serious injection of political hubris, allowed the bloom to happen,” he said.
The stink over the Reflecting Pool happens to coincide with a congressional fight over reauthorization of the Harmful Algal Bloom and Hypoxia Research and Control Act. (Yes, really.) Some scientists hope they can use the new petri dish on the Mall as part of their lobbying campaign, but concern is also simmering that the fight against the kind of algae that can harm drinking water, fisheries, and tourism—a topic that has enjoyed bipartisan support—may now enter the political vortex.
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Representatives from Green Water Solutions—that is the actual name of the company—which provided the $1.7 million nanobubbling system, did not respond to requests for comment. That system is supposed to inject nanobubbles containing the powerful oxidant ozone that can kill algae and break down the organic material they have produced, including their toxins.
Meanwhile, tourists as well as locals are now coming to check out the latest Washington attraction, which reflects not the majesty of the Mall but something more humbling: how clumps of aquatic plant matter foiled the wishes of the most powerful man in the world. And how the president who said he’d drain the swamp has instead created the conditions for a new one.
So Algae-gate is a persistent thing just half a month before July 4th. With Trump, expect something stupid to cover up a previous act of stupidity. Maybe he will try adding blue vegetable dye or even ink to the pool. Or perhaps the construction company concealing his deleted name at the Kennedy Center with tarp could be contracted to tarp over the reflecting pool. No solution is too idiotic or too wasteful to hide another humiliation to the Stable Genius in Chief.
