Heirn finished his more than eighty-kilometer bike ride by the lake. He took off his cycling gloves and, he said, was just about to touch a long strip of peeling rubbery material when he was detained by the National Guard and federal police and charged with destroying government property.
“I didn’t vandalize anything,” Heirn told the BBC. “I didn’t destroy, break or tear anything. Before I looked around, I was handcuffed,” he added. According to his words, he just wanted to touch the peeling part of the paint that had come off the bottom in the water. “I didn’t tear anything,” he added. He ended up spending five hours in custody. The court is scheduled for the beginning of July. Heirn described his arrest as “arbitrary and capricious prosecution”.
Reconstruction of the so-called The mirror lake cost American taxpayers 14 million dollars (approx. 300 million crowns). The reconstruction was carried out by the company that built the pool in one of Trump’s golf centers. She received the order without competition, and it is not without interest that its owner is Trump’s sponsor and neighbor from Florida, John J. Cafaro. Among other things, he was previously convicted of corruption. The order was originally worth 1.7 million dollars (more than 35 million crowns), but in the end the price increased almost tenfold.
Trump boasted that he himself chose a color darker than it had been there so far and called it “the blue of the American flag”.
Basically, immediately after the completion of the reconstruction, problems started to appear and cyanobacteria and algae appeared in the water. Experts blame the darker coating on the bottom of the lake. Cyanobacteria and algae appear in shallow pools or lakes in warm weather (the lake turned green even after reconstruction in 2012), dark blue, which absorbs sunlight better, but speeds up the whole process and the greens thrive.
However, the Trump administration claimed it was the remnants of algae that had formed in the pipes during the renovation, and dealt with it by pouring liters of hydrogen peroxide into the pool. It is he who could be responsible for the peeling of the new coating.
However, Trump immediately started blaming “vandals” on his social network for the failed reconstruction, such as ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl.
In his tirade about the state of the lake, he also accused “Radical left-wing lunatics, most likely Democrats, who have spent their entire lives trying to destroy our country.” Trump also blames the alleged vandals for the yellowed lawns that line the lake.
