The U.S. Army has presented its initial assessment of the damage done to the roads of Washington, D.C., by the heavy battle tanks that were a key part of President Donald Trump’s 250th birthday celebration for the military.
The president ordered a lavish parade to honor the founding of the Army on June 14, which also happened to be Trump’s birthday.
In advance of the event, city officials had expressed concern that the tanks participating could place undue strain on Washington’s streets, potentially requiring millions of dollars in maintenance work to repair.
The budget for the festivities was estimated at $45 million, with $16 million of that total set aside for road repairs. Organizers moved in advance to place thick metal plates, up to 20 feet in length, at turning points along the route to ease the pressure, at a cost of $3 million.
Speaking in advance of the event, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said she was “concerned” about the potential scope of the damage.
“These are, for the most part, local streets, and if they’re rendered unusable, we have to make them usable,” she said.
“Probably we would fix it and then go seek our money from the Fed. That gives me some concern about fronting costs and waiting for them to get back.”
Happily, however, the Army has concluded that the damage to the capital’s highways and byways was minimal.
“A tank ran over a curb, and that curb got broken – crushed,” spokesman Steve Warren said. “So, we will be fixing that. But, right now, that’s the only damage that we’ve identified.”
He added that a “subterranean” assessment of the roads is still ongoing to check whether the parade damaged underground cables or other infrastructure.
D.C. Department of Transportation spokesman German Vigil also said a visual survey of city roads had revealed no apparent issues.
The National Park Service is meanwhile waiting one month to make a final assessment of possible damage to federally controlled roadways, such as the Mall and the George Washington Parkway.
Warren also revealed that the final attendance figures for the parade were approximately 198,000, some way short of the 250,000 claimed by the White House.
The event itself largely passed off without adverse incident and appeared to achieve its aims. However, the president allegedly raged at U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth behind the scenes over the troops taking part, in his opinion, for presenting too cheery a demeanor.
“He’s p***ed off at the soldiers,” Trump biographer Michael Wolff claimed on The Daily Beast’s podcast in its aftermath.
“He’s accusing them of hamming it up, and by that, he seems to mean that they were having a good time, that they were waving, that they were enjoying themselves and showing a convivial face rather than a military face.”
The show of military might came on the same day that millions of people took to the streets of America’s cities for a “No Kings” protest against Trump, hours after Minnesota Democrat Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a political assassin and against a backdrop of unrest in Los Angeles and conflict in the Middle East.
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