By admin 
Donald Trump has a new nemesis, with a name worthy of a supervillain: Scenedesmus.
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The Reflecting Pool on the National Mall has become the country’s most high-profile science experiment, with workers battling against nature. After a week of combat, they have essentially killed off one type of algae infesting the pool, only to create the conditions for a new type to take over. And Scenedesmus, a genus of green algae nicknamed “Skinny Dead Mouse” by scientists, is now flourishing, according to testing that was run at the request of The Atlantic.
The pool, at the moment, looks like a strange bit of modern art. As workers treat different sections, the areas where they succeed in reducing the algae turn lighter shades of green. In some places, the water is relatively clear. In others, it’s an oily sludge. A quick glance, though, is enough to confirm that this is not the American-flag blue it was supposed to be.
Over the past few days, I’ve seen baby ducks swim through the pool; National Park Service workers wading around as they try to clean it; small children bending over to touch it. But none of the NPS workers at the site have been able to definitively tell me whether despite all of the algae—some species of which can be toxic—the water remains safe.
A spokesperson at the Department of Interior told me “there is ongoing water testing happening,” but would not disclose the results of those tests. Requests to spokespeople at the NPS have gone unanswered. I have been in touch with scientists who have applied for permits to get into the pool and conduct their own tests, but those permits have yet to be granted.
With the lack of transparency from the federal government and no clarity on what’s inside that murky water, I decided to dig—or dip—a little deeper myself. So late on Thursday morning, I filled several water bottles from different areas of the pool. Some were fairly clear, while other samples were dark green. My samples were delivered to two different scientists by that evening.
When algae first began to flourish in the Reflecting Pool, it appeared to be a blue-green cyanobacterial bloom that had taken over. Photos showed the kind of greenish surface film that can be indicative of that algae, which in some instances may produce neurotoxins harmful to people and pets. When Hans W. Paerl, a professor of marine and environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, opened the bottle of one of the samples I collected, he detected the distinctive earthy scents reminiscent of other cyanobacterial blooms he’d previously smelled. Under the microscope, he could see remnants of the previous bloom, but they were too degraded to identify. He attributed this, in part, to the endless jugs of hydrogen peroxide that workers had dumped into the pool to kill off the algae. “The guys dealing with peroxide treatment can pat themselves on the back,” he told me. “But it doesn’t really solve the overall problem.”
In fact, it’s created a new problem: The green algae, perhaps in the absence of the blue-green algae, are absolutely flourishing. “It is a pretty aggressive grower,” Paerl said. “What’s happened is they’ve just switched the players. And the green algae are just taking over.”
“I’ve never seen it bloom quite this thick,” Greg Boyer, a professor emeritus of biochemistry at the State University of New York, who analyzed our other samples, told me.
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Boyer ran additional tests that determined there was little to no blue-green algae in the samples, making it highly unlikely to be toxic. That is to be expected, he said, at least for the moment. “This is peak season for green algae,” he said. “We’re pretty early in the season for blue-green algae.” In the next few weeks, by late July, that could change.
The treatments that NPS is now using to combat the bloom—hydrogen peroxide and nanobubble technology—are more effective at fighting blue-green algae. The green algae that are growing now, both Boyer and Paerl told me, are not likely to be discouraged by those methods, and so far they are proving to be resilient. Boyer was able to run tests to determine the current health of the algae. “They are stressed, but they are definitely not dead,” he said. “If I was going to design a facility to grow algae, I would probably design a facility that had a lot of surface area and was very shallow, so you have sunlight down to the bottom. And put a lot of nutrients in it. And that’s pretty much what the Reflecting Pool is. It’s just a perfect facility for growing algae.” The decision to paint the bottom a deep shade of blue, scientists have told me, raised the water temperature and accelerated the growth.
Bottom line? “The water will probably remain green for the foreseeable future,” Paerl said.
For the past week, workers at the Reflecting Pool have attempted to vacuum algae from the bottom, with hoses connected to the vacuums pumping water down nearby drains. The work, apparently, has become something of an emergency, with an email going out to NPS employees asking for volunteers to work 12-hour shifts and help pump out the algae as part of “critical pre-July 4th operational needs.” The email, which was reported by MeidasTouch Network, referred to the operation as a “regional and national priority.”
Yesterday evening, I saw several people in the center of the pool. They were dressed in the D.C. office uniform of khakis and a dress shirt, wearing waders as they vacuumed. As one of them ended a shift, handing his equipment back to NPS workers, he said he was “just doing my part.”
But another problem has also emerged: The sealant at the bottom of the pool, which was the bulk of the $16.4 million renovation project, is beginning to peel off. By yesterday evening, a whole chunk was gone. Tourists and locals were converging on the site where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke and where protesters denounced the Vietnam War, just to catch a glimpse of the wayward sealant—or perhaps even a souvenir.
“Taking a piece of paint is like taking a piece of the Berlin Wall,” one cyclist passing by told me. “It’s a piece of history.”
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