Contractor Blames Its Own Repairs, Not Vandals, for Reflecting Pool Failure
The contractor said the pool’s new blue liner peeled and tore because of “human oversight” and a flawed plan that involved layering two incompatible chemicals, documents show.
David A. Fahrenthold and Maxine Joselow
Reporting from Washington
The contractor that renovated the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has told the Trump administration that errors in its own work and flaws in the repair plan, not vandalism, caused the pool’s new blue liner to peel and break loose, according to government documents reviewed by The New York Times.
President Trump has repeatedly blamed vandals wielding knives or box cutters for damage to the pool’s “American flag blue” liner, even after the Justice Department dropped charges that it had brought against people accused of vandalizing the national landmark.
But the documents, which have not previously been reported, make clear that the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, found problems in both the design and the execution of the renovation. The documents include Atlantic’s reports to the government as well as daily progress updates from the National Park Service over the past two months.
Atlantic blamed its own errors in a report dated Aug. 14 and then provided more detail on Sept. 2, the documents show. The Justice Department, which had charged several people with vandalizing the pool in early July, began moving to dismiss the cases on July 31.
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Because of “human oversight,” workers in some areas did not spray enough of the primer that made the layers of the liner stick together, Atlantic said in the documents. But the bigger problem, the company said, was that the repair plan laid out in the contract called for the layers of liner to include two chemicals that turned out to be incompatible.
The chemical on top reached a temperature hotter than what the compound underneath could withstand, and the heat caused the bottom layer to blister and come loose, the documents show. The contractor said it had not expected that outcome because it was very uncommon to mix the two products in that way.
The failure illustrates the consequences of the Trump administration’s rushed effort to renovate the pool this spring. In a hurry to finish the work before the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4, the government bypassed competition and gave Atlantic a no-bid contract to carry out an untested approach designed in part by the general manager of one of Mr. Trump’s golf clubs.
The government has agreed to pay Atlantic $14.7 million for its work. The contractor has said it will repair the pool, which is under warranty, again.
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Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, did not directly address questions about the contractor’s findings but issued a statement that appeared to continue blaming vandals for the damage, saying that they had “repeatedly reached into the pool and ripped at the coating.”
Ms. Martin said Atlantic was now “well on its way” to repairing the pool. She did not say when it would be refilled.
A White House spokeswoman, Taylor Rogers, offered a broad statement lauding Mr. Trump’s efforts to renovate the pool and referred questions about the contractor’s findings to the Interior Department.
“President Trump promised to make D.C. safe and beautiful, and he’s delivering,” Ms. Rogers said.
Representatives for Atlantic did not respond to requests for comment.
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The pool is still drained, and repairs appear to be ongoing: On Thursday, the pool was full of workers. Some were seen tearing up large strips of the blue lining, while another sprayed a new layer of coating as a man in a shirt reading “Atlantic Coating Inspection” watched.
The documents show that, to redo the repairs, Atlantic said it would use a smaller team of workers that would be closely supervised, and that it would consult an adviser from the manufacturer of the compounds used in the liner.
The manufacturer, Rhino Linings, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Its chief executive, Pierre Gagnon, said in a June statement that the peeling liner was “limited to isolated areas” of the pool.
The documents also show that Atlantic did blame vandals for cuts in the caulking around the pool’s edge that National Park Service workers had previously reported to the police. But the company did not link those cuts to the peeling of the blue liner on the pool’s floor, which Mr. Trump repeatedly blamed on “sick people” wielding knives or razors.
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Federal prosecutors acted on the president’s claims on July 2, when they announced the indictment of David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist accused of pulling up a piece of the liner, on a felony vandalism charge.
But in a remarkable reversal a few weeks later, prosecutors sought to dismiss the charges against Mr. Hearn and three others accused of vandalizing the landmark. Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, wrote that the Interior Department had misled her staff about the extent to which the damage had stemmed from vandalism rather than a “botched installation.”
Mr. Trump continued to blame vandals for the damage even after that, though he conceded in a social-media post on Aug. 9 that “there is no video or proof.”
“There was also some contractor error done by rushing the job for a July 4th opening,” Mr. Trump said in that post. “But it was a very small area of this massive Pool, and was relatively inconsequential.”
Mr. Trump said then that the pool would reopen “shortly.” But it remains drained a month later. The documents reviewed by The Times help explain why. They show that repairing the pool has been a challenging and involved task.
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On Aug. 13, the contractor began power-washing the pool to remove loose chunks of blue liner, according to the documents. By the end of the next day, workers had filled one large trash bag, but many more bits of liner remained stuck to the pool’s concrete slabs and would need to be removed later with razor blades, hammers and crowbars.
After removing the loose pieces, the documents show, Atlantic sought to reapply the blue coating, only to encounter the same problems as before: Blisters would appear under the surface, between layers of the lining. Early this month, the company concluded that the problem was the interaction between the two compounds and stopped layering the hotter one on top, the documents show.
That reduced the blisters, the documents show. But it did not stop them completely.
Also early this month, the contractor identified a new potential culprit: sweat. It said that a worker, wearing a protective suit under the hot Washington sun, was leaving droplets of sweat on the coating, which were then trapped when new layers were sprayed on top.
To try to solve that problem, the documents show, the man then opened the top part of his protective suit and wrapped cloth around his head and wrists to contain the sweat. The documents reviewed by The Times do not say if that stopped the blisters.
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A National Park Service employee had notified workers on Aug. 14 that Mr. Trump would be flying over the pool on Marine One that day, according to the documents. Gregory Wischer, a political appointee at the Interior Department, also visited the Reflecting Pool that day to personally supervise this work, the documents show.
Mr. Wischer, a former executive at a metal processing company, originally joined the Trump administration last year to work on critical minerals policy. But he has since shifted his focus to the Reflecting Pool renovation and the president’s other pet projects in Washington.
In March, Mr. Wischer met with David Schutzenhofer, the manager of a Trump Organization golf club in New Jersey who helped plan the pool’s renovations, according to Interior Department visitor logs. And on Monday, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that Mr. Wischer had updated him on work to clean and wax statues of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri and the French heroine Joan of Arc in a park in Northwest Washington.
Georgia Gee contributed research.
David A. Fahrenthold is a Times investigative reporter writing about nonprofit organizations. He has been a reporter for two decades.
Maxine Joselow covers climate change and the environment for The Times. Contact her securely on Signal: @MaxineJ.55
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