National Park Service says Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool liner was cut

A National Park Service official said the liner along the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was cut with a sharp knife or razor, damaging foam sealant installed during a $16 million rehabilitation of one of the National Mall’s most familiar landmarks. The U.S. Park Police responded on June 9 after the Park Service reported the damage.

The filing said the police report described a caulk layer over the foam sealant that had been cut and delaminating surface material that had been destroyed. It also said about 70 fence post tops were thrown into the pool, adding a second layer of physical damage to a structure that sits between the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The Park Service account sharply narrowed the picture from the version Donald Trump offered earlier in the week. Trump blamed vandals for what he called a 300-foot-long gash in the pool and said a box cutter or knife may have been used, while also accusing someone of putting fertiliser in the water. Those claims have not been backed by public evidence in the reporting reviewed so far.

The Reflecting Pool was completed in 1924 and has become one of the most recognizable and filmed sites on the National Mall. The Park Service has said the rehabilitation was meant to clean the pool, repair joints and install lining material, part of a larger federal effort to address structural deficiencies, persistent water leakage and the lack of circulation or filtration systems. The agency has described it as one of its largest ongoing Recovery Act projects.

The engineering problems go beyond surface wear. Park Service planning documents say differential soil settlement has compromised the pool’s structural system, stressing the foundation, joints and coping and causing pervasive water loss. The pool historically uses potable municipal water, and leakage combined with evaporation has long made it an inefficient piece of the Lincoln Memorial landscape.

The latest filing shifts the dispute away from political speculation and toward the physical evidence now in the record: a cut liner, damaged sealant and debris thrown into the water. What remains at issue is how much of the destruction came from deliberate tampering, how much from construction failure, and how quickly public claims outran the facts at a federally protected site.