Blue pool blues

There is something to be said for having a President who knows a thing or two about construction projects. As Ezra Pound wrote in his monster poem, The Cantos: 'War, one war after another. / Men start ’em who couldn’t put up a good hen-roost' [Canto XVIII, p. 83].

I was reading recently about the technical professionalism that the Trump administration is putting into the renovation of the Reflecting Pool, which stretches between the Lincoln Memorial, and the Washington Monument in Washington DC. The project is under the immediate control of Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior, one of the many people that Trump has brought into his team that has actually done real stuff in his career.

Burgum, responding to the New York Times' confected catalogue of misery about the project, revealed the same grasp of technical detail that his boss has shown on numerous occasions. Here are some highlights from his review of the current status of the project [the length of the quote is necessary to give readers a taste of a politician with a grasp of detail]:

It is one of the most visited and photographed Pools in the World and, when we took it over, it was a disgusting, garbage strewn dump that leaked, smelled, and was an embarrassment to our Country, and two of our Greatest Presidents. 45,000 Gallons a Day of water was pouring out of its broken seams, so that water would have to run continuously just to keep it at the same level. All of that will soon be fixed for a small fraction of the Hundreds of Millions of Dollars that the Obama and Biden Administrations haplessly wasted, only to have a Pool that was in worse shape after they finished the job.

After ripping out industrial-scale dumpsters worth of decaying and failing expansion joints, the Trump administration is now installing industrial-grade, leak-proof materials for the expansion joints. Anyone familiar with large-scale construction projects would understand materials are tested to ensure they perform effectively before being deployed at scale.

The massive slabs that form the bottom of the pool, which is much longer than the Empire State building, expand and contract based on the temperature. Specialized materials are necessary for the expansion joints to handle the expected movement while not breaking, cracking or leaking. This is something the Obama administration didn’t understand.

After consultation with the Army Corps of Engineers Engineering Research and Design Center, a 6-foot test section for the final expansion joint materials was installed last week before the recent rain and cooler weather. The test section passed testing with flying colors and is in perfect condition at this time. Notably, during the testing with the cooler nights last week, the test joint expanded more than 1 inch, but the material in the expansion joint remained perfectly intact, providing a perfect seal to prevent leakage. As we know @POTUS is an expert builder.

The final system for the expansion joints involves filling the 2.5 miles of joint expansion with urethane-impregnated foam, which is then covered by urethane caulk. That caulk is allowed to set overnight and is then coated with a very flexible and stretchy polyurea – the final layer in the expansion joint system. These materials will handle the 1-2″ of movement these joints experience from summer to winter without any issues.

@SecretaryBurgum/X

Again quoting Ezra, the poet-sage: 'That hath the light of the doer, as it were' [Canto LI, p. 252].

Readers who want to be reminded of how such projects are handled by the know-nothings who run most Western governments should revisit our deep-dive into the Grenfell Tower Fire Catastrophe, the judicial process for which is still grinding on, seemingly without end; or perhaps, if you are not already angry enough, try the Horizon Scandal, the judicial process… ditto, ditto. These two events make me so angry that I have given up tracking them. Nothing will come of them.

Coda

As it happens, a friend emailed me this morning with a pool problem. He has an apartment in a small block of flats in the Tessin, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. The outdoor swimming pool in the garden had been drained over the winter.

One of the residents decided to give the pool a spruce up before it was refilled, even going so far as to paint the pool a nice blue colour. No good deed goes unpunished. After refilling, the first bathers in the next warm spell emerged with nice blue feet. Let's hope they didn't swallow any of the water.