Reflecting Pool contractor says repair errors caused failures instead of 'vandals'

The contractor that renovated the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool told President Donald Trump's administration that its own errors, not vandals, caused the new blue liner to fail.

Atlantic Industrial Coatings blamed its own work in an Aug. 14 report and added more detail on Sept. 2, according to government documents the New York Times reviewed. The newspaper published its account Friday. The documents cover the past two months.

The records include the company's reports to the government and daily progress updates from the National Park Service, according to the Times.

Workers in some areas did not spray enough of the primer that holds the liner's layers together, Atlantic said, blaming "human oversight."

The bigger problem, the company said, was the repair plan written into its contract, which called for the liner to be built from two chemicals that proved incompatible. The chemical on top reached a temperature hotter than the compound underneath could withstand, and the heat made the bottom layer blister and come loose, the documents show.

Atlantic said it did not expect that outcome because the two products are rarely mixed that way, the Times reported.

Trump has repeatedly blamed vandals armed with knives or box cutters for the damage to the pool's blue liner, and he has described them as "sick people." Atlantic did blame vandals for cuts in the caulking around the pool's edge, damage that National Park Service workers had already reported to the police, the documents show.

But the company never connected those cuts to the peeling of the blue liner on the pool's floor, the Times reported.

Atlantic representatives did not respond to the newspaper's requests for comment.

Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, did not directly address the contractor's findings, the Times reported. She instead issued a statement that appeared to keep blaming vandals, saying they had "repeatedly reached into the pool and ripped at the coating."

Martin said Atlantic was "well on its way" to repairing the pool, according to the Times. She did not say when it would be refilled.

A White House spokeswoman, Taylor Rogers, praised the president's renovation effort and referred questions about the contractor's findings to the Interior Department, the Times reported.

"President Trump promised to make D.C. safe and beautiful, and he's delivering," Rogers said.

Atlantic began power-washing the pool on Aug. 13 to knock chunks of the blue liner loose, the documents show. Workers had filled one large trash bag by the end of the next day, and many more bits of liner were still stuck to the concrete slabs, according to the documents.

The records show those pieces would have to be scraped off later with razor blades, hammers and crowbars. The company then tried to reapply the blue coating and ran into the same trouble, with blisters forming under the surface between the layers, the Times reported.

Atlantic concluded early this month that the two compounds were reacting with each other and stopped layering the hotter one on top, the documents show. That cut down on the blisters but did not stop them.

The contractor also identified a new suspect this month in sweat, according to the documents.

A worker in a protective suit under the hot Washington sun was leaving droplets on the coating that were sealed in when new layers were sprayed over them, Atlantic told the government. The worker opened the top of his suit and wrapped cloth around his head and wrists to catch the sweat.

The records do not say whether that stopped the blisters, the Times reported.

Rhino Linings, which makes the compounds, did not immediately respond to the newspaper. Its chief executive, Pierre Gagnon, said in a June statement that the peeling was "limited to isolated areas" of the pool.

The pool was still full of workers on Thursday. Some were tearing up large strips of blue lining while another sprayed on a fresh layer of coating, and a man in a shirt reading "Atlantic Coating Inspection" watched, the newspaper reported.

The government has agreed to pay Atlantic $14.7 million for the job, and the company has said it will repair the pool again under warranty, the Times reported. A National Park Service employee told workers on Aug. 14 that Trump would fly over the pool on Marine One that day, the documents show.

Gregory Wischer, a political appointee at the Interior Department, came to the pool the same day to supervise the work himself, according to the documents.

Wischer, a former executive at a metal processing company, joined the administration last year to work on critical minerals policy and has since shifted to the pool and other presidential projects in Washington, the Times reported.

He met in March with David Schutzenhofer, the manager of a Trump Organization golf club in New Jersey, according to Interior Department visitor logs cited by the newspaper. Schutzenhofer helped plan the renovation and helped design the untested approach the government chose.

Trump wrote on social media Monday that Wischer had briefed him on work to clean and wax statues of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri and the French heroine Joan of Arc in a Northwest Washington park.

In April, Trump announced that he would fix the pool's leaks and change the color of its bottom to "American flag blue," The Hill reported. He wanted the work finished before the nation's 250th birthday on July 4.

The Interior Department skipped competitive bidding and handed the job to Atlantic, a Virginia firm that had never held a federal contract, according to The Hill. The company had worked on pools at a Trump golf club in Sterling, Virginia, the outlet reported.

Trump initially priced repairs at about $1.5 million, The Independent reported. He told reporters he had chosen a company he knew.

"I have a guy who's unbelievable at doing swimming pools up the road," Trump said.

The coating started peeling within days of the pool's reopening in June, and algae bloomed in the water, The Hill reported.

Federal prosecutors indicted David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist, on July 2 on a felony vandalism charge, accusing him of pulling up a piece of the liner. Prosecutors moved on July 31 to dismiss that case and the charges against three other people accused of damaging the landmark.

Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, wrote that the Interior Department had misled her staff about how much of the damage came from vandalism rather than a "botched installation," the newspaper reported.

Trump turned on Pirro days later, telling reporters in the Oval Office that he was disappointed in her, CBS News reported.

"She folded like an umbrella," Trump said. "Frankly, I think she choked."

The president kept blaming vandals anyway, though he conceded in an Aug. 9 social media post that "there is no video or proof," the Times reported.

"There was also some contractor error done by rushing the job for a July 4th opening," Trump wrote. "But it was a very small area of this massive Pool, and was relatively inconsequential."

Trump said then that the pool would reopen "shortly," according to the Times. It remained drained a month later.

Atlantic told the government it would redo the repairs with a smaller crew under close supervision and bring in an adviser from the company that makes the compounds, the documents show.