Comment on this is exactly the shit fucking job you'd expect from him to repair a national monument
fizzle@quokk.au 2 days agoNot trying to defend Trump but I don’t think that’s necessarily what’s going on.
Someone linked an article. The thing has cost heaps of money to maintain over the last hundred years. It leaks so bad it costs $1m a year just to keep it topped up with water.
The article says it’s the marshy soil, which makes sense. The whole thing has sunk quite a bit - article says 12 inches which seems absurd. Different areas would decompose at different rates so the joints would open up all the time.
Sounds like they decided to “fix” it with a spray on pool liner stuff, which of course is blue because swimming pools are blue.
My guess would be that fixing it would be a massive undertaking, that would cost money and require a competent and qualified contractor, and that’s just not something Trump knows how to do.
In these kinds of situations, all he knows how to do is grift and enrich himself, and that means really shoddy work (if there’s any work at all).
12 inches isn’t that bad as far as subsidence issues can get. The ground below you is filled with very tiny holes and gaps that water seeps down into and fills and flows through, kind of like a sponge. While water fills those pores it’s difficult to squish down the soil.
If a heavy weight is on them like a building, though, that can put on enough pressure to push the water out of those pores and flow down out and around. A mix of soil and voids/air give much less resistance to weight than a mix of soil and water filling the gaps so then the voids get compacted down and the ground sinks. Different soils in different conditions may not evenly subside and that can give you a situation like the Leaning Tower of Pisa where one side was subsiding faster than the other side. In modern construction people try to get the water out and compact the ground ahead of time so that it acts more consistently and doesn’t make big changes when a heavy object is placed on it.
Here’s a picture from an agricultural area in California illustrating ~30 ft of subsidence that occurred in that area over a half century of pumping out the groundwater to water the crops.
(This also makes flooding worse… ground that used to be filled with holes that could channel the water down and away into large aquifers is now compacted such that those holes are gone. So instead water piles up on the surface in huge sheets that flow and wipe out whatever is between them and a lower elevation.)
1 million a year topping it off isn’t even that much, relatively. We probably spend more than that in a month on the military.
You probably spend that much on the military every few minutes, but that’s no the point.
If something is leaking $1m of water a year then it’s worth paying $6m to stop it leaking.
f314@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Oh, it definitely seems like it is in need of repairs. But the article also says the contractor talked Trump out of a “Bahamas turquoise” color for the liner, so I feel like this is at least a little bit of both 😅