Company trying to clean Reflecting Pool is thrust into political storm, hires crisis communications firm

The $1.7 million "ozone nanobubbler" being used in an effort to make the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool water crystal clear has a unique ability to shoot 500 million microscopic bubbles into every teaspoon of water. The injected oxygen is supposed to oxidize — or, unscientifically speaking, smash through — algae, bacteria and other chemicals.

The Trump administration has touted the technology as "state of the art." At the onset of the project, the administration dispatched a small company based in Brookfield, Ohio — one of the only in the country with this type of technology — to lead the high-profile, high-stakes gambit to see whether the technology could work on the 6.5 million-gallon landmark that for decades has evaded cleanliness. Only five years old, the technology has never been formally used or researched on a pool.