The freak-outs over the restoration of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are completely unwarranted and comically wrong, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggested during an interview on Breitbart News Daily, informing listeners that prior to these fixes it leaked 45,000 gallons of water per day.
“This pool is eight acres,” Burgum said, explaining that one could put the Washington Monument on top of the Empire State Building to reflect the enormity of the pool, which spans over 2,000 feet.
Former President Obama’s administration closed the Reflecting Pool for two years and spent $38 million attempting to repair it, to no avail.
“The fix didn’t work. It’s been leaking ever since they decided it was going to be a green project. They’re going to save on city water. They put water in from the Potomac. It got an algae bloom. If you look at aerial photos from – again what this thing looked like when we inherited it, doesn’t look blue. It looks green,” he pointed out.
“I mean, completely green on the aerial photos, because it was just filled with algae,” Burgum said.
An international visitor brought the dismal state of the Reflecting Pool to President Trump’s attention, and the rest is history.
“He said he wanted it clean. We started digging into this thing,” the Trump administration official explained.
The project is immense, including draining it, sand blasting, repairing all of the pipes, bubblers, and more. Further, the Interior Secretary explained, the bottom surface had turned gray. Burgum also explained that it was a much darker color 100 years ago, because it was meant to reflect.
“If you have a swimming pool, you want a light blue bottom. You want to be able to see down into the bottom, whether it’s three feet or 10 feet, safe to jump in. But on a reflecting pool, you want it dark. President Trump chose American flag blue, it’s the same exact blue that’s in the American flag. It is going to be perfect for reflecting,” Burgum said.
He noted that the establishment media – namely, the New York Times – freaked out when they put down the primer, which is a much brighter blue.
“Some storied journalists from the New York Times effectively almost lost their minds and started, you know, talking about the color, and it wasn’t even the finished color, it was the primer color of the epoxy before this industrial liner went down,” he said.
Burgum explained the project involves “two and a half miles of expansion joints.”
“When you have something 2,000 feet long – and in D.C. it’s 90 degrees in the summer and zero on a few days in the winter – it’s over six inches of expansion and contraction that we have to manage in this construction project to not have it leak. And this thing was leaking – before we started this project two months ago – 45,000 gallons a day,” he said.
“We had to have water continuously running into it, just to keep even. All of that’s going to be taken care of, because we’ve got the master builder,” Burgum said. “We’ve got President Trump. You know, he’s the only guy that’s ever occupied that office that’s done the level of complex construction projects. And he loves construction workers. He loves construction, and he knows exactly what he’s talking about on these projects.”
LISTEN:
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.