Dear Mr. President,
Hello from Florida, where you call your second home and where you probably go golfing every week.
There’s a pesky intruder at a reflecting pool in Washington that’s causing a big problem, but it’s not Antifa, it’s an algae bloom.
You must be deeply offended to see the media treating this as a huge embarrassment to you. Slate called it “an unavoidable metaphor for the Trump administration’s incompetence, waste, careless interference with iconic federal property, and overall bad taste.” This is one of the milder explanations.
Then I heard a comic comparing it to the Iran war and calling it “Warm Strait of Ooze” I’m sure you’ll be furious enough to have ketchup thrown at you.
After all, your entire goal here was to award some no-bid government contracts to donors to do some quick work so that America can enjoy a beautiful blue reflecting pool in time for Saturday’s big Fourth of July celebrations.
Now, instead of blue water, you’re dealing with a green mess like the ones the creatures from the Black Lagoon called home.
Algae blooms turn the blue reflecting pool green. (screen capture)
I would like to make some suggestions to help you. After all, we’ve been dealing with algae blooms here in Florida for a long time.
I remember well the Fourth of July weekend 10 years ago. A bloom of rotting blue-green algae as thick as guacamole forced Martin County officials to close Jensen Beach, about an hour north of Mar-a-Lago, due to health concerns.
“I’ve seen Jensen Beach closed because of sharks,” the owner of the town’s Driftwood Motel told me at the time. “I’ve never seen one closed because of algae.”
One of her nurse friends said the worst odor “smelled like death on crackers.”
A similar algae bloom occurred on the opposite coast of the state, prompting the state’s governor at the time, now known as Sen. Rick Scott, to declare a state of emergency.
We’re still dealing with this mess. Just last week, the Florida Department of Health issued a warning to everyone to be aware of toxic algae in Lake Okeechobee. Residents were warned not to swim in certain areas of the lake and to keep their pets away. Otherwise, you’ll die like the three ducks found in the Reflecting Pool.
So, I’m not coming to you in tears, but I would be happy to give you some guidance on how to deal with your algae outbreak based on how we’ve dealt with it in the past.
First, whatever you do, don’t ask Gov. Ron DeSantis for advice.
master of greenwashing
I know your relationship with Governor D has had more ups and downs than stumbling through a playground in a hurricane.
By “rise” I mean when your support got him elected in 2018. The “down” was when he ran against you in the 2024 presidential nomination race and you called him an “infidel.”
Gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis looks at algae blooms in the St. Lucie River in 2018 (from the DeSantis campaign)
When dealing with algae blooms, we should treat the governor’s name as if it were “Don’t Santis.”
The reason goes back to 2018, which was plagued by so many toxic algae blooms that it was dubbed the “summer of slime.”
Scott, who was governor at the time, was running for the U.S. Senate. Many people accused him of allowing pollution to increase, which fueled algae growth. They booed him so thoroughly that he ran away from the protesters. For many years afterward, he became known as “Red Tide Rick.” (Speaking of which, don’t ask him for advice.)
Mr. DeSantis vowed to solve the algae problem, and people believed him. After winning, he wrote an op-ed in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel saying, “I intend to fulfill my campaign promise. That means prioritizing environmental issues like water quality and cleaning up the environmental mess that has led to toxic blue-green algae and worsening red tide around the state.”
After taking office, he appointed a committee of working scientists to recommend action against the algae bloom. They did.
And, unfortunately, he and Congress ignored almost all of their recommendations. They passed laws that required polluters to do nothing. And he praised the weak law as if it were a major environmental victory.
Chris Costello (via Sierra Club)
“DeSantis is a master of greenwashing, and it’s literally left us covered in slime,” said Chris Costello of the Sierra Club.
An ongoing algae bloom has depleted the Indian River Lagoon’s seagrass, causing more than 1,000 manatees to starve to death.
Instead of doing what the scientists recommended, DeSantis signed a secret deal with an Israeli company called BlueGreen (no, I’m not making this up) Water Technologies. The country paid an Israeli company millions of dollars to repeatedly dump a hydrogen peroxide mixture into waterways contaminated with algae.
The algae disappeared for a while. But because the governor didn’t order government agencies to stop the pollution, the bloom just keeps coming back.
“DeSantis’ fight against Florida’s algal blooms will fail,” the CEO of BlueGreen Water Technologies wrote on social media in 2019. “There is no question that we must work to prevent raw sewage and runoff from entering our waterways.”
Mr. DeSantis’ betrayal of his campaign promise foreshadowed his entire career. He vetoed funding for restoration of the Ocklawaha River, built a destructive tent city in the Big Cypress Preserve (even though it completely undermined all Everglades restoration work he had approved), and sought to install a golf course in Jonathan Dickinson State Park.
I heard the National Park Service also dumps hydrogen peroxide into reflecting pools. I can see why this is a temporary fix at best, but DeSantis is fine with temporary fixes.
Unlike him, you should try to focus on the root cause of the bloom.
how to deal with the heat
I consulted my friends in Florida about what to do. You’ve probably never met any of them because they don’t hang out in fancy places like Mar-a-Lago Country Club.
But they know about algae blooms.
These people reminded me that microscopic algae persist in small amounts in still water. The two things that cause the explosion we call a bloom are 1) heat and 2) nutrients.
First, let’s talk about the heat. That will be the trickiest part of the discussion.
You have repeatedly complained about what you call the “climate change hoax,” but the data actually shows that our days and nights are getting warmer. That’s why our oceans are warming and hurricanes are getting faster and stronger.
Climate scientists have repeatedly warned that one of the consequences of living in a warmer world is that we will see more blooms of toxic algae, just like the one we saw at Reflecting Pools.
You keep telling us how smart you are, so I think you can see why it’s a bad idea to reject the clear and convincing facts about the climate crisis that everyone can see.
Even your friend Vladimir Putin admits that climate change is real. And China, ruled by your friend Xi Jinping, is on track to reach net-zero emissions ahead of schedule.
I understand that you don’t want to admit that you’re wrong. But doing something about algae blooms doesn’t require announcing that you’ve been wrong about climate change all along.
Instead, you can say that you have changed your mind about color.
Don’t paint it black
When you first announced that you were going to repaint your reflecting pool, you said, “We’re going to repaint our reflecting pool. “In the end, we’ll have a beautiful, beautiful reflecting pool, just as it should be. In fact, it’s much better than it was before.”
At first, he was thinking of painting it turquoise, but then someone persuaded him to paint it a dark blue, similar to the American flag.
Gary Roderick from the subject
One of my sources, Gary Roderick, previously served as the Southeast Bureau Chief for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. He noted that dark colors tend to absorb more heat from the sun, so repainting the pool surface a deep blue will likely make the water very hot.
The only thing that sucked was copying the Rolling Stones and painting them black. Imagine how hot the water would be then.
The blue paint is peeling off due to hydrogen peroxide (or, as you claim, vandals have cut it), so it’s the perfect time to repaint it a lighter color.
This is my advice. Please declare that you have reconsidered. Now, you said you think a pool should be dazzling white, not turquoise or blue.
why is it white? Explain that you want to align with the pure character of the founding fathers. I’m sure the people at Fox will bow down in praise of you.
If you repaint your reflecting pool white, it will tend to reflect the rays from the sun warming the water like a pot on the stove (hehe!).
Doesn’t that seem like the behavior of a smart person who passed all the cognitive tests?
Now let’s talk about what you’ve been feeding these little green monsters.
cement pond
As we learned in Florida, when you feed an algae bloom with nutrients like fertilizer or sewage, it tends to grow, just as the wacky pro-algae demonstrators at the Reflecting Pool chant, “Let’s grow, algae, let’s grow!”
Carl Dygert via screengrab
Some, like Capt. Karl Dygert of the Florida Conservation Network, blame the state’s rampant spraying of herbicides for promoting Florida’s blooms.
So, what causes flowers to bloom in the pool?
Despite the name, a reflecting pool is not actually a pool. It has a surface area of almost 8 acres and holds over 6 million gallons of water. Even a big, strong swimmer like Olympian Michael Phelps wouldn’t have been able to do a good swimming lap in that soccer.
The reflecting pool looks a lot like the “cement pond” where the Clampett family splashed around in “The Beverly Hillsbillies.” It is a large concrete pond designed to reflect the surrounding monuments.
The water in the reflecting pool is not tap water (though city water is sometimes used), nor is it from a Florida bottler like Zephyrhills. Instead, it is pumped from the Tidal Basin, which connects to the Potomac River, which was heavily contaminated by a 300 million gallon sewage spill earlier this year.
The water in the reflecting pool goes through a filtration system, but it doesn’t catch all the impurities, so I assume some of the sewage got through.
Meanwhile, the nanobubbler that was installed in the pool to ensure clean water appears to have been turned off for the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s birthday event. By the time we turned it back on, the algae had a pretty big head start.
Hydrogen peroxide actually made things worse.
Park officials flushed peroxide into the pool to flush out the blue-green algae, but that only made room for “green algae that are more stubborn and difficult to remove,” said Wright State University biological sciences professor Wayne Carmichael, quoted by PBS.
Now the nanobubbler is bubbling again and the algae are gone. But it could easily happen again, especially if the Potomac River sewage spill happens again. As it turns out, there was also a major algae bloom in 2012 after the last major renovation.
Now, the park service says they plan to drain it again after Independence Day and start over. So here are my suggestions for eliminating what is causing the algae.
One of the donors supporting the Freedom 250 celebration is a Florida company known as Mosaic. The company mines phosphate, the main ingredient in fertilizer, and needs federal approval to expand one of its giant gypsum stacks.
Despite Mosaic’s frequent television ads claiming to be a friend of the environment, many in the state blame Mosaic for the pollution that repeatedly causes algae blooms in Florida.
Why not ask Mosaic to cover the cost of refilling your reflecting pool with clean, filtered water, which is missing the Potomac poop factor?Given the huge sales volume, you should be able to ask them to include other types of greenery to keep it clean as well.
Independent journalism for everyone
As a nonprofit newsroom, our stories are free and accessible to everyone. Readers like you make that possible. Will you help keep Watchdog Report Today?
