The crisis over the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool's water turning green has reopened a new front of political sparring between the administration of President Donald Trump and that of former President Barack Obama, just days after the announcement that a renovation project on the famous pool had been completed at a cost of $14 million.
The crisis casts a shadow over earlier promises by President Trump to paint the pool's floor "American flag blue" to give it a distinctive patriotic appearance. However, the sudden emergence of familiar green algae blooms on the surface has triggered a wave of criticism and controversy over the maintenance work that the current administration had widely promoted.
In a swift response to criticism directed at the project, a spokesperson for the US Department of the Interior launched a sharp attack on the administration of former President Obama, attempting to link the current algae crisis to historical failures seen during pool reopenings stretching back decades.
The spokesperson stated in an official release that the problem of algae blooms had plagued every reopening since 1922, pointing specifically to the reopening that took place under Obama, which resulted in massive algae formations that disfigured the appearance of the memorial. The spokesperson argued that drawing comparisons in this context does a disservice to the current technical efforts, according to The Independent.
The department defended the efficiency of the ongoing renovation work, affirming the use of modern and advanced technologies to address the crisis in a thorough manner unlike previous approaches. The statement noted that the advanced "nanobubble" technology recently introduced had already succeeded in eliminating the living green algae and destroying their biological structure, and that technical crews are currently vacuuming up the dead residue to purify the water and restore it to the desired blue appearance.
This media sparring highlights the sensitive nature of symbolic projects in the capital Washington, where naturally occurring algae are transformed from a routine environmental problem into an arena for political point-scoring and score-settling between successive administrations.