National Mall Construction to Affect July 4 Celebrations

June 29, 2012

Tourists walk past work underway to reconstruct the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on the National Mall in Washington, May 11, 2011.

The National Mall in Washington hosts Independence Day celebrations every July 4th. Thousands of Americans watch a fireworks show, listen to concerts and take in the sights. But this year, some of the Mall will be inaccessible to visitors.

Construction on National Mall

If you are one of the 25 million tourists visiting the National Mall this year, you can't help but notice that it's going through changes.

National Park Service information officer Carol Johnson says there are three massive construction projects. "We've never done projects quite this big. I mean, the Lincoln Reflecting Pool is the Big Kahuna [biggest one]," she explained.

The pool has been gutted and totally rebuilt.

"Washington D.C. is on a landfill and it had started to sink," said Johnson. "It was leaking about 500,000 gallons [2 million liters] of water a week."

There's a levy project off to the side of the World War II Memorial for storm-water management.

"It's sort of been unobtrusive during the construction, so we haven't had too many complaints," stated Johnson.

And then there's this one. It's a construction project that has ripped apart four blocks of the National Mall. And it's just steps away from the Capitol, which is hosting a big Independence Day concert."