Photos Show Trash In & Around Reflecting Pool After July 4 Fireworks Show
The claim: A collection of photos authentically show trash and debris near and inside the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after a fireworks show for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4, 2026.
The trashed reflecting pool’s trials and tribulations continue.
In the days after America’s 250th birthday celebration at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on July 4, 2026, social media users shared a collection of photos purportedly showing trash bags and debris scattered around and within the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
The pictures spread on Facebook and Instagram. Tabloid newspapers like The Mirror also published some of the photographs alongside criticism of U.S. President Donald Trump’s massive Fourth of July fireworks show.
(Laura Thompson/@wawawomp on Instagram)
These photos legitimately reflect what the area around the pool looked like after the July Fourth event. A professional freelance photographer, Laura Thompson, took many of the pictures that spread online and posted them under her Instagram handle, @wawawomp.
Laura Thompson has shared the original and edited image files with our team, which indicated via the file name, NEF, that she took the pictures on a Nikon camera. And, she also shared a screenshot of metadata for a couple of the photos, allowing us to confirm their time, date and other details.
The Mirror’s story about the reflecting pool photographs listed “Laura Thompson/Shutterstock” as a source. A search on Shutterstock, a photo database, for keywords returned the pictures Thompson captured.
Thompson also shared a photograph (below) of the reflecting pool taken on July 6, indicating that the National Park Service had not managed to entirely clean up the area by that point in time.
(Laura Thompson)
Additional popular pictures of the reflecting pool circulating online appeared to originate as screenshots from a video that Amanda Moore — a freelance journalist who has previously written for progressive publications like Mother Jones and The Nation — posted on X.
While metadata can be manipulated, other people took similar videos of the reflecting pool and workers in bright yellow cleaning the landmark from different angles, lending additional credibility to the authenticity of Thompson’s pictures. Furthermore, Thompson is a reputable photojournalist whose work has previously appeared in The New York Times and other credible publications.
As such, we have rated this claim as true.