I have to admit that ever since I discovered the existence of the livecam that points directly at the Lincoln Reflecting pool, I have been checking it regularly to see what progress is being made in fixing what has clearly become yet another symbol, if a minor one, of Trump’s utter incompetence at doing anything. While nowhere close to the cost in lives and money of his blundering in Iran and the economy, shredding formerly good relations with allies such as Canada and others, and so many other missteps, this failure is highly visible, even if he tries to hide the debacle by surrounding the pool with high metal fencing and then covering that with black tarpaulin. I am surprised that he has not ordered the livecam to be removed, since it directly contradicts in real time his repeated claims that the pool is almost fixed.

I asked my browser search engine whether the pool can be fixed and its AI replied with a confident ‘yes’ and then linked to a New York Times article from a week ago, presumably in support of its answer. But reading the article, one gets the sense, reinforced by the accompanying photos, that while work is being done on the pool, the problems may well be insurmountable. In reports to the administration, the contractor Atlantic Industrial Coatings conceded that it was their own fault, and not that of vandals as claimed by Trump, that created this fiasco.

[T]he 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 photos accompanying the article are telling, showing workers still in the process of peeling away huge strips of the old blue liner, sweeping up the debris, and spray washing the floor.

The big mistake that Trump may have made is in thinking that the way one builds a normal swimming pool can be scaled up to something the size of the Lincoln pool, which is roughly the size of 25 Olympic-sized swimming pools. It turns out that they are encountering problems that they did not anticipate, such as that even sweat from the workers was causing the material to blister and peel.

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.

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. [This makes the claim of vandals using knives look pathetic-MS]
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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.

While technology can solve many problems, I am sticking to my prediction that the Lincoln pool cannot be fixed (even if they use AI to come up with a solution) and that it will remain out of sight until Trump leaves office and a new sane administration abandons the whole thing and takes it back to its original concrete base.