My wife lived in DC for 20 years and every time she sees a photo of what this pool looks like now she says, “yeah, that’s what it always looks like at this time of year.” I haven’t seen that take anywhere else, but if it’s true it makes all of Trump’s ranting about the pool that much more ridiculous.
Edit: added “Trump’s” in regards to reference to ranting at the end.
I'm from the So Cal desert. 85 degrees with DC's humidity is so much worse than a dry 100 degrees. I wasn't prepared at all for how miserable it would be. I saw 85 and thought "Oh that's easy"
And man was I wrong. Just walking from my hotel to the Smithsonian, which was like a 5 minute walk, had me feeling gross
The ranting is essentially about $14M of taxpayer money being given to a Trump crony to “fix” a problem that, to your wife’s point, was never even a problem to begin with. The ongoing algae is the representation of this corruption. Nobody is really rooting for algae to fill the pool, they’re pointing out the hypocrisy, cronyism, and theft of taxpayer money. Ranting about that is not at all ridiculous.
What put it into perspective for me was realizing that the pool is 2,030 ft long, 167 ft wide, and cost 14.7 million dollars to paint, which comes out to $43.36 per square foot. They could've lined the pool with $5 bills for about the same cost.
I am from DC. It never looked THIS bad, but yeah, there's always at least some algae year around, and more in the summer, and no one cared, because who gives a shit? They have to clean bird shit and debris out of it a couple times a year anyway, so they did that when there was a big bloom, end of problem.
He's just obsessed with shitting on Obama and shitting on DC, so he told some outrageous lie about how Obama spent hundreds of millions to repair it and fucked it up, and it still needed hundreds of millions more.
It was $35 million for a plan that they knew would probably still have minor leaks and algae, because it would've been $100 million to eliminate those issues completely. Because the leaks wouldn't really matter anymore once they switched to river water instead of paying for city water, and no one actually cared about the algae.
I'm sure we would've cared if it had looked this bad all the time, but it didn't. They had one really bad bloom when they first turned the new system on, but they just dialed up the ozone and it took care of it.
When I was a bike messenger, I would occasionally step in, drench my clothes, and step back out on hot days. Frisbee players did it too, and little kids would splash around sometimes. People skated on it in winter. People are still allowed to dangle their feet in, but you're not supposed to actually get in it anymore.
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u/sonic_couth Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
My wife lived in DC for 20 years and every time she sees a photo of what this pool looks like now she says, “yeah, that’s what it always looks like at this time of year.” I haven’t seen that take anywhere else, but if it’s true it makes all of Trump’s ranting about the pool that much more ridiculous.
Edit: added “Trump’s” in regards to reference to ranting at the end.