Reflections on the Reflecting Pool

Curmie recognizes that the Reflecting Pool saga is no longer front-page news, but he went ahead with this post for two reasons.  First, it was mostly written before Curmie went on vacation with Beloved Spouse, and it seemed a shame not to finish it.  Second, and more importantly, the whole episode serves as an apt encapsulation of the entire Trump administration. 

Step 1: find a minor problem and amplify it to significance to distract from the hugely unpopular war with Iran, the skyrocketing gasoline prices, the Epstein files, and a host of other manifestations of administrative incompetence (or worse). 

Step 2: hire a couple of cronies at inflated prices with little if any regard for their actual skill-sets. 

Step 3: when they proceed to make things far worse than they were when they started their project, make utterly unsupported and almost certainly mendacious claims—in this case about vandalism, including arresting people for touching the peeled paint floating on the surface of the pool. 

Step 4: when no one other than the MAGA faithful believes your bullshit, shout even louder and with even less plausibility.  A 350-foot-long gash with no photographic evidence?  And yet another tarp to block the view of anyone but your minions? Really?  Lather, rinse, repeat.  If there’s one thing you can count on with this administration, it’s that they will never take responsibility for their own failures.

If nothing else, the Reflecting Pool debacle has provided plenty of fodder for satirists, comedians, cartoonists, and similar wags.  Curmie is quite fond of the cartoon you see here (credit to Living Blue in Florida).  When I read about the arrest of David Hearn, the first thing that came to mind was the Group W bench described by Arlo Guthrie in “Alice’s Restaurant,” one of the anthems of my youth.  I thought of this before seeing that someone had already had the same thought.  Curmie notes the irony of telling you, Gentle Reader, that you’ll have to trust him about that part in an essay that discusses the lack of actual evidence for an assertion.  (We’ll get there, I promise.)

There are the paint swatches of swampy green labeled “American Flag Blue,” the designation of the pool as the Strait of Warm Ooze, and the restoration project “The Art of the Peel.”  There’s a supposed poll that shows Dear Leader “Vastly Less Popular than Algae”;  you can buy a “Piece of Presidential History” (a chunk of peeled paint) for a mere $250.  There’s the wonderful meme about Goody Proctor throwing algae into the reflecting pool, and the one in which Dear Leader says all he can see is scum, to receive the reply that it is a reflecting pool.

Curmie’s favorite, though, may be the (slightly adapted) song titles:  CCR’s “Green River” and of course Kermit the Frog’s classic “It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green” can go as is, but there are a goodly number of minor variants that still leave the original clearly identifiable: Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Resealed,” the Chambers Brothers’ “Slime Has Come Today,” Cyndi Lauper’s “Slime After Slime,” Jim Croce’s “Slime in a Bottle,” the Zombies’ “Slime of the Season,” the Doobies’ “What a Pool Believes,” Peter Frampton’s “Do You Peel Like I Do,” the Beatles’ “Scum Together,” Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Algae”… well, there are more, but that’s a good sample.  Someone added another suggestion Curmie particularly liked, but you’d probably have to be of his generation to get the allusion: it would be fun to hear the Hal David/Burt Bacharach song begin, “What’s it all about, Algae?”

Two points need to be made.  The first is that all the satire, punning, and the like are appropriate.  The whole process was (and is) a disaster: ethically, legally, environmentally, and financially.  And to call the contractors incompetent would probably be to give them too much credit.  There’s a good timeline on the NBC News site.  A few of the highlights: Trump, bypassing his legal obligation to involve Congress, announced the project in late April, saying it would cost between 1.5 and 2 million dollars, and would be done in “a week.”  The current cost is over $16 million, not counting the cost of the federal employees involved, and still isn’t complete three months later.

Two separate no-bid contracts were signed: one with Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the other with Green Water Solutions.  The former proclaims itself “a woman owned advanced coatings application company,” but the owner/VP is identified elsewhere as Curtis E. "Eddie" Wood, whose position is listed still elsewhere as CEO.  If you can make sense of all this, Gentle Reader, you’re way ahead of Curmie.  Oh, and they also remind us that “ALL the credit goes to Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!! Thank you!!”  <Sigh.>

The other contractor, Green Water, is headed by John Cafaro, who not only looks like the crime tsar in a gangster movie, but also acts like one, having pleaded guilty to bribing a Congresscritter and campaign finance fraud.  Needless to say, he was pardoned by Trump.  The $350,000 he donated to Trump’s ’20 and ’24 campaigns, plus apparently hundreds of thousands more to Trump-affiliated PACs, are of course totally unrelated to any of this.  😉  Oh, and the White House was not involved in selecting the contractors, and the folks who did were unaware of Cafaro’s… erm… largesse.  Hey, if you can’t trust a lackey from the Interior Department and a White House spokesperson, who can you trust?

The first step was to drain the pool, then to paint the bottom “American flag blue.”  There was a lawsuit filed to prevent the re-painting because changing the color would, among other things, make the pool less reflective.  The re-painting went forward, and the pool wasn’t as reflective.  Go figure. 

There are two separate but (perhaps) related (go ahead, Gentle Reader, insert the “Law & Order” “dundun” here) problems here: the algae and the peeling paint.  The former has been a problem for a long time: direct sunlight, pretty much stagnant water, warm weather… that adds up to a pretty good possibility of algae accumulation, and that can happen very quickly.  Curmie can’t find a reliable source to support the claim that the pool was refilled with water from the Potomac, which would indeed have been colossally stupid and therefore, given this administration and its hirelings, quite plausible.  It’s not necessarily the fault of the administration or the contractors that things seem out of control now… well, except for the fact that Green Water was hired specifically to keep this from happening. 

The peeling paint, on the other hand, is directly attributable to the incompetence of the Atlantic Industrial Coatings team, who were clearly out of their depth (if you’ll pardon the expression, Gentle Reader) on this project.  Curmie claims no expertise in matters relating to reflecting pool maintenance and repair, and he knows better than to trust some stranger on Facebook who claims to know what he’s talking about.  That said, the comments from people who say they’re professionals do make sense: here’s one example:

As a DC9 union painter with 30+ years in coatings, I’m looking at the failure not a conspiracy theory.  When a coating is lifting off in large sheets like this, that points to an adhesion failure: improper surface preparation, contamination left behind, the wrong coating system, poot recoat timing, or water introduced before the system fully cured.

A quality two-part epoxy system can perform well but the product is only as good as the prop and the application.  The substrate has to be properly profiled/cleaned, the specified primer or first coat applied correctly, recoat windows followed, and the full system allowed to cure before being put back into service.

That is not “vandals.”  That is a coating failure that deserves a real independent inspection and an explanation of exactly what system was specified and how it was applied.

That sounds pretty reasonable to Curmie.  He also suggests that driving a freaking convoy over the surface before it was fully cured might not have been the best idea in history.  Well, unless the whole thing was intended as a diversion all along.  Yes, that’s a totally unsupported hypothesis… which makes it more believable than anything coming from this administration.