Budget gives funds to repair memorial’s sinking seawall
By: Michael Neibauer
Examiner Staff Writer
March 13, 2009
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Jefferson Memorial
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The omnibus 2009 federal spending bill signed by President Barack Obama this week authorizes the National Park Service to fix the Jefferson Memorial seawall, which is sinking into the Tidal Basin.
The budget permits the Park Service to enter into a contract for construction work on the Jefferson Memorial plaza and seawall that surrounds the iconic domed monument to the nation’s third president. The appropriations bill provides $10 million to start the project, though NPS officials expect more money, as much as $10 million more, will be needed in fiscal 2010.
The Jefferson Memorial, dedicated in 1943, is secured in the Tidal Basin with steel girders hammered into bedrock. The memorial’s seawall, constructed in the late 1960s, was not anchored in rock, which is why the wall has sunk by as much as 9 inches over roughly the past 20 months, Park Service spokesman Bill Line said Thursday.
The area closest to the sinking seawall is roped off, Line said, as it “presents a safety issue, that someone could slip and trip and fall.”
“We have not had any injuries,” Line told The Examiner. “We have not had anybody fall into the water.”
The NPS plans to “repair and rehabilitate the seawall to its original condition, to a condition that it doesn’t sink again,” Line said. Work is to include repairs to the memorial’s north plaza and north plaza lighting, according to the 2009-2014 Federal Capital Improvements Program adopted last fall by the National Capital Planning Commission.
The emergency project, the commission said, will “mitigate movement at the Jefferson Memorial seawall, north plaza and surrounding landscape.”
D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton said Wednesday that the Jefferson Memorial repairs would have been perfect for the recently enacted $787 billion economic stimulus bill. An early version of the legislation included $200 million to refurbish National Mall, but it was struck from the bill.
“Most of the money that was demagogued out would have gone to the sinking Jefferson Memorial,” Norton said. “That was shovel-ready, and that was an emergency.”
Norton later acknowledged that the memorial itself isn’t sinking, but she said, “If the seawall sinks, you’re not going to have a memorial for very long.”
