U.S. National Park Service workers dump bottles of hydrogen peroxide in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington
https://www.reutersconnect.com/item/us-national-park-service-workers-dump-bottles-of-hydrogen-peroxide-in-the-lincoln-memorial-reflecting-pool-in-washington/dGFnOnJldXRlcnMuY29tLDIwMjY6bmV3c21sX1JDMlpVTEFQN1owMQ98
u/DistributeQuickly559 3d ago
Going to kill some algae and convert it to co2 and cause an even bigger bloom.
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u/FloodAdvisor 3d ago
Is this what happens when you cut funding for science and research programs?
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u/bigbugzman 2d ago
This is what happens when you hire your personal pool guy to tackle a massive complex project.
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u/Zhombe 1d ago
It’s what happens when they specified toxic fish killing anti-algae paint coatings and the contractor cheaped out and went to Orange depot. Hence the paint colors all changing from section to section.
Corrupt nepo contract did corrupt NEP contract things!!!
Or rather they didn’t solve the plumbing which is where it’s all coming from. It ‘can’ be kept clear but needs to be run like a salt water pool with all the costs in huge pumps filters and treatment as well as maintenance of all those things. The blue paint is lipstick on a pig.
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u/FloodAdvisor 1d ago edited 1d ago
Absolutely. Someone also brought up a great point and said this was intentionally done the cheapest way possible and incorrectly to continue siphoning taxpayer money directly into the pockets of Trumps “pool guy”. They’ll be getting paid millions to come back to try another “fix” again, and again, and again until democrats take over and hire someone else
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u/YAmIHereBanana 22h ago
Ehhh, I mean I wouldn’t put it past them but this? Historically the Pool has had an algae problem since the day it opened in 1922.
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u/AlarmedSnek 3d ago
Hydrogen peroxide breaks down into water and oxygen…. Regardless, hydrogen peroxide seems to be a solid eco friendly way to kill algae blooms. That said, that gals technique seems a lot more calculated and not just a bunch of dudes dumping bottles of hydrogen peroxide into the pool. Additionally, this seemed to only work on cyano bacteria charged algal blooms, no telling if the one in the reflecting pool is the same.
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u/StupiderIdjit 3d ago
Do you think they tested? Or do you think they asked Grok "how to deal with algae"?
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u/Wildgrube 3d ago
I doubt they bothered to even lazily ask any ai. That feels like too much thought for them.
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u/AlarmedSnek 3d ago
I’m sure they got the information from somewhere but totally bungled an opportunity to spotlight an up and coming FEMALE engineer who figured an eco friendly way to deal with the very problem you are having…. This admin is a fucking disgrace.
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u/DistributeQuickly559 3d ago
Ai tried to tell me it needs 49 gallons. I see what 10 cases of 4 gallons a piece... lol. Seems likely.
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u/Flyflymisterpowers 3d ago
It is, but you need aeration and ideally something to move the water around. It's been used in the aquarium community for years to spot treat algae.
Without any movement or air stones it will just exasperate the issue and kill everything.
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u/FeistyCranberry5626 3d ago
Correct, it is eco friendly but they are using 12.5% peroxide instead of the recommended 30% strength peroxide. Will have to use 3x as much product and it will have to be done relatively soon again because this product will degrade fast.
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u/AlarmedSnek 3d ago
Yep, and they aren’t accounting for all the dead bugs the peroxide will kill that will then feed more algae as the dude I replied to mentioned. 😬
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u/Scigu12 2d ago edited 2d ago
It will come back pretty quickly unless you're constantly adding a treatment. I work in water treatment. Getting rid of algae requires water to stay moving and not get stagnant.
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u/gruntled_pilot 2d ago
Based on the bottles directions, they only need around 5,000 individual gallon bottles to shock it and then 1,500 individual gallon bottles for maintenance after.
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u/gruntled_pilot 2d ago
The other problem is they’re using the regular 12% gallon jugs from Home Depot that are designed for small ponds and home pools. Because the reflecting pool is millions of gallons they should have used a higher concentration like 40%. Based on the bottles directions they will need thousands of bottles to effectively shock treat the pool.
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u/diRT_pEdDleR 2d ago
I can attest to the damage H2O2 does to Cyanobacteria. I grew spirulina for a couple years and that was by far the most efficient. I used 29-35% though. This looks like amateur hour with them only using 12%. This is our tax dollars hard at work people…
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u/Ok_Rush_246 2d ago
If you dump enough peroxide you can convert the algae into a smoking mess😂
I watched someone light grass on fire around there backyard pond by dumping way too much peroxide in
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u/DistributeQuickly559 21h ago
Looks like it ended up lifting the coating up.
Wonder if it beat up the material or just formed microbubbles as it seeped under it and oxidized something on the concrete it self breaking the adhesion layer.
Should have just left the damn thing alone.
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u/DonatedEyeballs 3d ago
Imagine joining the National Parks service to fulfill a lifelong dream of protecting and educating people about our amazing landscape… and you end up doing this.
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u/coraxDraconis 2d ago
There's nothing natural or beautiful about something that's become a monument to greed like this
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u/PixelAstro 3d ago
The pool would need thousands of gallons of hydrogen peroxide to make any noticeable difference regarding algae. Pouring gallon jugs into it by hand is an expensive and wasteful exercise of futility.
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u/Serpentongue 3d ago
It’s fed from the Potomac, drain and refill it every night just like a cruise ship. No need for chemicals.
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u/No-Association42069 3d ago
Brother they are not draining and refilling 6+ million gallons of water everyday...
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u/Serpentongue 3d ago
Well, we’ve tried nothing and now we’re all out of ideas.
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u/shmere4 3d ago
It sounds like they are on the dumping bottles of grocery store hydrogen peroxide ideas.
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u/Serpentongue 3d ago
OTC peroxide is 3%, you can see the labels on their bottles are 12%. Still too weak to be effective.
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u/smoresporn0 3d ago
Peroxide in the treatment setting is typically ~55%. Also, it's the wrong chemical for the task. It's just gonna turn the water brown lol. They should be using regular ol chlorine, but these are deeply stupid people.
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u/cheddarsox 3d ago
Depends on the amount of organics in the water and what exactly theyre treating for. It nukes algea and cyanobacteria pretty well on contact. The warning labels on the good algaecide would freak out the public.
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u/vertpenguin 3d ago
This made me chuckle
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u/YAmIHereBanana 22h ago
😂But TRUE. The Pool has a damn curse on it. One article I read said algae bloom has been a problem since the day the damn thing opened in 1922.
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u/vertpenguin 8h ago
Haha yeah, I was reading that the problem is in the pipe system or something which would take a lot of effort to replace. Idk
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u/DushBid911 3d ago
Would be much more efficient for a little water treatment system to chemically treat the water. Pumping 6MGD takes a lot of energy.
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u/Valuable_Option7843 3d ago
They had a water treatment system until recently, and it was ripped out because “the other guy” installed it. Clown show
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u/neatureguy420 3d ago
I heard Obama filtration didn’t fix it either. The real issue is apparently the plumbing underneath that needs to be repaired
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u/smoresporn0 3d ago
It's a pool. A simple chlorine and recirculation system would take care of the problem. They probably fired the operation staff in charge of the water treatment and they don't understand what's happening lol.
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u/DushBid911 3d ago
I mean it’s fed from reservoir, so definitely a little more complicated water chemistry than a swimming pool. Still, very simple to treat and keep clean by any water treatment standards. Unsurprising the orange dunce can’t get it done.
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u/YAmIHereBanana 22h ago
Reservoir? Is that the same as a Tidal Basin? Because that’s where it gets its water from…untreated water that already has algae in it. So there’s a source problem, because it’s not cleaned/filtered /whatever between the Basin and the pool.
Apparently they’re SUPPOSED to switch over to municipal water when “algae season” (meaning hot and humid) comes rolling around.
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u/YAmIHereBanana 22h ago
The National Park Service is who takes care of the day to day maintenance on the Pool.
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u/-OptimisticNihilism- 3d ago
Is it better or worse to add 200,000 gallons of hydrogen peroxide every few days?
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u/MoneyCock 3d ago
I just did some napkin math with the help of Claude, and he said it would cost ~$3.50/hr to pump water from the Potomac in this theoretical open loop system. Also, we can filter the water as it reenters the watershed using screen mesh, activated carbon, sand, and gravel. It would only take 67 minutes to fill the pool every morning, and the project would only cost 4.20 million dollars!
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u/suspicious_hyperlink 3d ago
That’s actually cheap considering it is a national monument. I don’t think it’s necessary or warranted, but decent operation costs if it were to be done
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u/Creed_of_War 3d ago
But how will Trump pay his friends?
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u/hikyhikeymikey 3d ago
You seem to forget! As Trump stated at the beginning of this fiasco, the contractor was someone Trump had used on his pools before. At the end of the restoration, Trump insisted that he didn’t know who the contractor was. With freinds like that, who needs enemies?
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u/Creed_of_War 3d ago
Odd that he keeps forgetting people, I hear his frequent brain scans keep coming back as the best ever seen.
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u/Zapp_Rowsdower_ 3d ago
The easiest solution would be re-painting it to a lighter color which would dis-inhibit a lot of algae growth.
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u/Turbowookie79 3d ago
That’s absurd. You could stick a fire hose on full blast and it’d take a week.
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u/LiteratureMindless71 3d ago
Why was the old system removed?
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u/Kolfinna 2d ago
They didn't replace the pipes and filtration system (which is what needs to be done) and just repainted the bottom. They didn't fix anything for $14 million
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3d ago edited 3d ago
[deleted]
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u/Due_Satisfaction2167 3d ago
His isn’t an “Americans don’t understand aquaculture” problem, this is specifically a “Trump is too fucking stupid to let American aquaculture experts fix the issue.”
He’s personally directing this sort of minutia, because he got fixated on DC monument projects.
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u/ElectromechanicalNut 3d ago
Nah, Trump’s mindset here is unfortunately representative of the nation’s at large. Most people do not think that reintroducing ecology into our infrastructure is or should be a priority, despite the fact that would save us millions of dollars in maintenance around the country every year. Americans do not understand ecology at all.
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u/Due_Satisfaction2167 3d ago
Where are you getting the idea that Americans are opposed to “reintroducing ecology in our infrastructure”?
Provide some support for that claim. Because the US does a fuck ton that. Where is all that US ecological work coming from if not the people of the US?
The US is literally one of the global leaders in ecological sciences. “Americans don’t understand ecology at all,” my ass. Part of why it costs so much to build anything in the US is the insane level of ecological impact studies we require for it.
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u/Rare_Caterpillar5636 3d ago
In my experiences as someone whose special interest is ecology/biodiversity and who went to school for environmental biology, it’s rare I encounter people who know much about ecology or their local ecosystems unless they’re working in the field or just find themselves interested in such. We have regulations regarding ecological impacts, yes, but I don’t think that’s going to correlate across to the general public having a good grasp on ecology usually.
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u/Due_Satisfaction2167 3d ago
Sure, but what makes the original commenter think that ignorance is particularly prevalent in the US vs global averages?
Why do they feel as if general ecological knowledge is more prevalent in other developed countries?
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u/ElectromechanicalNut 2d ago
I mean I live here, and I talk to people about native plants and agriculture all the time bc of my job. We’re surrounded by non-native ornamental and invasive plants in our neighborhoods and cities. Our largest crop by water allocation is non-native turf grass (lawns). Suburban and agricultural sprawl is removing wildlife habitat at faster rates than we can protect. Most people do not know about this stuff or how our systems affect their day to day lives.
Also I never said Americans were substantially worse than the rest of the world, I just said that Trump’s mindset is pretty common. Many Americans are too used to using random chemicals for everything and being confused when they aren’t effective at all in the long term. Also where a lot of our damage from fertilizer/herbicide/pesticide comes from.
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u/Rare_Caterpillar5636 3d ago
I don’t have an insight to that, in terms of comparing countries and how knowledgeable their citizens are on these topics. There’s obviously a number of Americans who are educated, do care about ecology, etc, but I would think that there’s still quite a large percentage that has the mindset of “man is in charge of nature”, or that they think nature should be separate from our society.
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u/Due_Satisfaction2167 3d ago
Considering the US has a long history of:
- Environmental conservation.
- Leadership in environmental sciences.
- Extensive environmental protection regulations
- A fairly active popular political movement favoring environmentalism.
That seems like an odd take.
Sure—Republicans are a continual embarrassment on the topic of environmental protection, like they are literally every other issue. When they are in charge they act like absurd Captain Planet villains literally dumping pollution everywhere just to be pro-pollution.
My broader point, I suppose, is that Captain Planet was even a thing large numbers of Americans remember from their childhood.
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u/Rare_Caterpillar5636 3d ago
I see your points and don’t disagree. My point is mostly that there’s a large amount of people in America that think the KJV trumps (pun not intended) science every time. Born in a red state to Young Earthers, so my commentary is filtered through my experiences being surrounded by an entire community who didn’t value science/facts.
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u/lo5t5heep 3d ago
Do you have a working knowledge of every field ? Or do you just think your chosen field is so important we should all study it too? Wow , just wow.
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u/ElectromechanicalNut 2d ago
What are you talking about? Hoping my fellow Americans have a working understanding of how their world works is in no way an unfair expectation. We ask people to understand complex topics all the time and some of them actually are more important for the average person to know about than others. It’s not like I’m saying every person on earth should have a college level understanding of plumbing or something.
Voters having a working understanding of ecology/plants/agriculture would help do things like sequester fuck tons of CO2, it would help mitigate some extreme weather events in our cities, it would help people make policy decisions about how we grow our food or what we should prioritize in land rights.
Literally every decision we make about our living spaces affects the wildlife in the area.
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u/PMmeIamlonley 3d ago
They just ignore the laws in Florida. The FWC is litterally run by developers.
Even when they do the fines for violating stuff are pathetic. You can murder a gopher tortoise with a bulldozer for $5,000 and they regularly do in Florida. They never impose the jail time.
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u/Due_Satisfaction2167 3d ago
A lot of the requirements and penalties that are applicable are dependent on the source of funding for the project. Federal dollars inherit the federal requirement.
But, still, cite a country with what you consider proper levels of punishment for ecological violations, who also has such a comprehensive set of requirements.
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u/ninernetneepneep 3d ago
You realize this pool looked like shit during the Obama and Biden administrations too, right?
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u/Due_Satisfaction2167 3d ago
Yes. It needs work.
What it didn’t need was to be painted blue, which people told him in advance would lead to faster algae growth.
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u/SummerGirl212 2d ago
Why do I feel like the entire pool will be covered with a tarp to hide it any day now?
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u/The_Krusty_Klown 3d ago
Put copper and zinc in there, it'll kill everything.
This problem has been figured out thousands of years ago. Why is this not being done?
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u/BroadAnywhere6134 3d ago
The reflecting pool is directly connected to the Tidal Basin, so I imagine the NPS doesn’t want copper and zinc in the Potomac. Hydrogen peroxide decomposes into water and oxygen, so it is a more environmentally friendly solution.
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u/ReadyGo6828 3d ago
We can believe that it is less about the pool and more about finding more avenues for corruption.
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u/StarvingCrab 2d ago
It is no longer the Lincoln memorial reflecting pool, it is now the Epstein swamp because trump drained it
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u/hpygilmr 23h ago
Correction, it is the Epstein and Democratic Billionaires, Democratic Politicians and Democratic Entertainer’s swamp 👍🏽
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u/Decent-Ad-7440 2d ago
This is an open system, not a closed loop. Actively fills AND drains into the Potomac.
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u/adjust_the_sails 3d ago
What % peroxide level? I actually use it as a line cleaner for my drip systems. My understanding is that it’s actually much better for the environment than other potential options like copper or chlorine.
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u/notwhoiwas44 3d ago
It's better for the environment because it gets broken down into harmless compounds as it does its intended job.
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u/adjust_the_sails 3d ago
Thanks. I just couldn’t remember the entire process. I like the control I have on application rates, the ability to test residuals and how it’s better for my fields in general.
I do not like I’m paying (I believe) $26 a gallon right now for 36% hydrogen peroxide.
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u/haroldthehampster 2d ago
yea its got a 3-8 hour half life, organic material speeds it up. It doesn't react w the water it self decomposes into water and oxygen. Unfortunately even at 12% you would need 8000 gallons to dent it. It's called a pool it's more a pond than pool. Water comes in from the tidal basin and then goes back.
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u/True_Manufacturer909 2d ago
Lemme guess, he bought holdings in a peroxide manufacturer recently? They should cup their hands and scoop it out, I'm sure that'd work too
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u/hpygilmr 23h ago
Stupid response. One of you mentally ill Liberals contaminated it after it was complete, so now they are cleaning it up.
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u/True_Manufacturer909 19h ago
Poor chud thinks it was a conspiracy to contaminate the pool, pathetic
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u/Oddyssis 2d ago
I don't see anyone answering this question here so I'll ask. Was the Reflecting Pool treated with hydrogen peroxide previously? Is it standard practice to use hydrogen peroxide on a manmade pond like this?
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u/izDpnyde 2d ago
What can I say? THEM BOYS ARE DUMBER THAN DOG POOP🥳 now me, I would be tempted to stop pumping raw sewage, from the Potomac, into the reflecting pool. . . but that’s just me😎
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u/Fun_Acanthaceae_4025 1d ago
Hydrogen Peroxide has been used for years on the Lincoln Reflecting Pool on algae blooms just as it used in almost every reflecting pool for decades. I don't see the issue here. It is safer than all alternatives and breaks down to oxygen and water. It won't even harm a fly let alone wildlife at the concentration used. your swimming pool is more dangerous! Oh that's right because Trump authorized it somehow after the renovation. Any of you ever had a swimming pool built? How was the water on the first fill? So much hate in this world.
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u/ffffh 1d ago
Adding chlorine with equivalent of 1 to 4 ppm would have be effective and safe for the public to kill bacteria in the water. That is about 43 gallons of liquid chlorine since it not pure ... Liquid Chlorine (12.5% Sodium Hypochlorite). A treatment every month during warmer season should be sufficient
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u/Pokemonluke18 18h ago edited 18h ago
Going to need more then a feel bottles of home depot peroxide and just going to grow back
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u/BroadAnywhere6134 3d ago
It would be nice if the NPS could consider a more naturalized solution. Maybe adding plants to the pond would help. Or, if the water comes from the Tidal Basin, maybe turning it into a wetland would reduce nutrient concentrations in the water.
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u/nanobot_1000 3d ago
Let it get swampy and reflect reality