Cracked Pools, Drained Savings: The Toll of “Concrete Cancer” in Texas

Janell Gregerson’s toenails are painted hot pink, a tropical color that evokes the joys of lounging by the water, margarita in hand. But as the single mother of four walks out her back door in Cedar Park, a suburb northwest of Austin, to “show off” her swimming pool—which she installed in 2021 for $120,000, after saving for six years—it’s clear she hasn’t been enjoying much aquatic R&R.

After less than three years of use, her pool has become a gaping, dangerous hole, its plaster crisscrossed by dozens of cracks. In the deep end, a nine-foot drop from where Gregerson stands, hundreds of mosquito larvae wriggle through a murky green pond fed by two months’ worth of rain. Gregerson says red wasps like to congregate at the pond’s edge. Scorpions build nests in the hot tub. “This was my ‘I’ve made it through my divorce, I am woman, hear me roar’ project,” she says. “It was something I’ve dreamed about since I was a kid.” Instead, “no one comes in my backyard” anymore. “It’s a graveyard.”

She isn’t the only homeowner in Central Texas feeling that way. Gregerson’s pool is suspected of having “concrete cancer,” the popular term for alkali-silica reaction (ASR), a condition that has affected more than 250 swimming pools built across the region since 2017 and for which there is no permanent fix. (There are likely many more ASR-affected pools in the area; a Facebook support group has more than 940 members.) Afflicted pools include ones located in luxury apartment complexes as well as behind single-family homes. Experts say concrete in everything from house foundation slabs to stormwater control systems may also be affected, though it could take years for symptoms to show.

The wealthiest owners have spent more than $1 million constructing, demolishing, and then rebuilding individual pools, with the cost for replacement running anywhere from $200,000 to $500,000, on average. But not everyone has that kind of money, and some pool builders’ insurance companies have denied claims. After staying home and rearing children for thirteen years, Gregerson found work as a home-sales representative and can barely afford the $11,000 she spent to have core samples of the concrete drilled so she can prove her pool has ASR, much less the $40,000 she’s been quoted to rip the concrete out. “Every time I see a pool sign in someone’s yard, where someone’s building a pool,” she says, “I just want to go run and knock on the door and be like, ‘Hey, have you ever heard of ASR?’ ”

It sounds almost like a middle school science experiment: According to Anol Mukhopadhyay, a senior research scientist at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, ASR is a chemical reaction in concrete that kicks off during the mixing process, when two ingredients—alkalis in wet cement and reactive silicate minerals in crushed stone, sand, and gravel—interact. The resulting chemical reaction produces a gel that soaks up moisture and swells. Over time, with long-term exposure to water (inevitable in swimming pools, of course), the expanding gel creates spiderweb-like cracks that widen and spread. More water enters, eventually corroding the steel supports within the concrete.

Damage can be avoided by using nonreactive rock, but that’s difficult in Texas, where most gravel mixtures, or aggregates, mined for concrete interact to some degree with wet cement, Mukhopadhyay says. A concrete mix with even mildly reactive rock needs a supplementary cementitious material (SCM) to neutralize it. The ideal SCM in this scenario is fly ash—a byproduct of coal combustion. Since the mid-2010s, when new environmental regulations caused many coal-burning power plants to shut down, the cost of high-quality fly ash has increased.

Despite the expense, the Texas Department of Transportation requires companies providing concrete for public infrastructure to replace a percentage of the cement with fly ash or another supplementary cementitious material. It also stipulates that aggregate suppliers provide rock for concrete that is free from “injurious amounts” of alkali. Companies working in private residential settings are subject to city and state codes that follow exhaustive international and residential building code standards, generally with the same requirements, though navigating the rules can be tedious and confusing, and not all contractors heed them.

After pools began crumbling in 2019, many were caught up in a blame game. Homeowners sued more than two dozen pool builders (including a former host of the HGTV show Pool Kings) and a few concrete companies, one of which filed third-party complaints against its material suppliers. In March 2023, in an effort to streamline the pretrial processes and keep rulings consistent, the Texas Supreme Court consolidated lawsuits filed against that concrete firm into a multidistrict lawsuit that now includes more than one hundred cases. At its heart is the question: Who should pay?

“It’s devastating when you’ve spent six figures [on a pool], then you jump in, notice it’s cracking, it starts leaking, and you’re helpless,” says David Wenholz, a lawyer based in Austin who represents more than two dozen homeowners across Hays, Travis, and Williamson Counties. “The pool builder is pointing the finger at the [concrete] supplier, and the supplier is saying, ‘We don’t have the resources to pay it; you need to ask your pool builder to contribute.’ The pool builder is saying, ‘We didn’t cause this.’ And we say, ‘Well, you built the pool. You warranted the pool.’ ”

Pool builders see things differently. “We had no idea we were getting sold a defective product,” says Bo Barnett, a pool installation–company owner for seventeen years whose company faces eleven lawsuits in Travis County. “[It] sabotaged not only our projects, but some of our careers.”

Barnett dove into the industry after graduating from the Art Institute of Dallas in 2002. In 2007 he cofounded KB Custom Pools, based in Kyle. But in 2019, customers started finding cracks. Barnett consulted engineers, who recommended repairing the damage with structural staples, epoxy, and mortar, but his clients grew angrier as new fissures kept appearing.

Three years later, according to a subsequent lawsuit against KB Pools involving nine pools, petrographic analysis—which involves examining thin sections of concrete core samples under a microscope—determined that at least eight of the nine pools had been damaged by ASR. They were built from shotcrete, a type of pneumatically sprayed concrete, which the lawsuit alleges was supplied by Easy Mix Concrete Services, an Austin-based company, which advertises the product as “ideal for aquatic structures such as swimming pools.” Bill Heath, a co-owner of Easy Mix, says this means the shotcrete has high compressive strength, adding, “There are supplementary cementitious materials that can be added that help waterproof it, but those have to be ordered.” Barnett says he contracted the company for about fifty jobs in 2017 and 2018. “The hardest ones are folks that have teenagers, and this is their senior year, this is their graduation, this was the house where everybody came for the swimming pool, and parents are crying across the table from you, and I’m bawling too, you know?” he says. “Emotionally, it’s been an absolute hell.”

Barnett’s insurance company settled eleven of eighteen claims before it dropped him, at which point, he says, he became uninsurable. He filed for bankruptcy in March, though he says he continues working in the industry. At times, he says, he has feared for his family’s safety. “I had a client tell me that they had an uncle that was a mob boss in Vegas, and if I did not fix their swimming pool, that I’d be putting my family in jeopardy.” Barnett says he called the police, and the man eventually apologized.

“That’s what I’m concerned about, is this could get violent,” says Chris Dobson of Leander, a former director at Facebook who opened a pool-construction business at the height of the COVID remodeling craze, in 2020, and has seen four of the pools he installed develop symptoms of ASR. Dobson says he has since removed his address from his website and stopped signing new contracts. “There’s a lot of money that people have lost out on, and they’re mad. . . . It’s getting rowdy.”

Some pool-industry experts say better education of installers could have prevented at least some bad pools from being poured. Barnett, who sits on the board of the Central Texas chapter of the Pool & Hot Tub Alliance, says he has completed 250 hours of pool-installation education but hadn’t heard of ASR before his pools started cracking. He never checked whether his concrete providers tested their mixes. “I would not have known to ask.” When Dobson decided to pivot away from tech, he says, he paid $5,000 for advanced certification, totaling forty hours of training, with the Alliance, and he says his textbooks made no explicit mention of ASR. “That would have been nice,” he says. In a statement, the association said it is “in the process of developing more training materials on this specific issue,” and that its Central Texas chapter “has been raising awareness of ASR in the area since 2021.”

John McIntyre, an engineer for more than forty years who teaches pool installation–certification classes, says he began discussing ASR at the Alliance’s Austin meetings, after he first heard about ASR occurring in local pools three years ago. But some builders remain ignorant. “I’ve been thumping on this like a Baptist Bible preacher,” McIntyre says. “They’re just not keeping up.”

Tyson Felker, a construction supervisor at Reliant Pools, based in Austin, feels builders should have known better. In early 2021, Felker switched concrete companies after a provider warned him. “Rumors were flying around,” he says. “So if you hear a rumor, why aren’t you investigating [it]?”

Felker started paying more for a better mix, increasing his cost per cubic yard from $150 to $230. His company has so far been untouched by ASR. Recently, Felker watched as his workers demolished a $150,000 pool built by another company in the northwest Austin suburbs, filling ten dump trucks with nearly four hundred tons of ASR-affected rock. “I was standing with the homeowner when we first started, and when he first saw us put that jackhammer to that pool, he grimaced.”

The growing number of unhappy customers has invited scrutiny of an industry that experts say is poorly regulated in Texas, a state whose top officials take pride in placing the interests of businesses over those of consumers. Paolo Benedetti, a pool builder, educator, and consultant in California, says some builders in Texas, who aren’t required to be licensed to construct pools, have “always been kind of flying by the seat of their pants.” Those working in cities that inspect pools are supposed to follow certain codes, but the codes are not always enforced, and some unincorporated counties don’t even require building permits for pools.

Benedetti and others say some ASR has been exacerbated by bad construction practices, including skimping on steel reinforcing rods, or rebars, which can also cause cracks that let in more water. Mukhopadhyay explains that while the moisture within concrete is sometimes enough to initiate the reaction, ASR can progress at an extremely slow rate for years until cracks caused by structural issues speed up and exacerbate its development. “The problem we have is that nobody is holding the pool contractors or any contractor responsible for their workmanship,” Benedetti says. “There’s this whole lineage of unaccountability, so the perfect storm hit, and there weren’t any checks and balances in place, and the whole house of cards fell. And who’s holding the bag? The homeowners.”

Heath, co-owner of Easy Mix and a defendant in dozens of lawsuits, started his company in 2016 after working in the industry for four decades. One Austin pool builder remembers him giving a talk about the benefits of fly ash at a meeting sponsored by the National Spa and Pool Institute in the 1980s. “He explained what fly ash was, how it was collected from smokestacks and integrated into the concrete mix for ‘aquatic concrete’ used in the shotcrete process,” says Michael Hurosky, owner of Austintatious Pools. “At the time I felt kind of like I was in science class—[like,] ‘When am I ever going to use this knowledge?’ ”

Reached by phone, Heath confirms that when he started his company—which also pours house slabs, driveways, sidewalks, and patios—he didn’t include fly ash in his mix. He says his operation did not produce enough as a new business to warrant purchasing the special mixer needed to “preblend” fly ash with cement.

Though previous companies Heath worked for used fly ash, he says, it was “not for ASR. It saved money.” He says he had never heard of ASR occurring in Central Texas until the last three years, never heard that aggregates mined near Texas’s Colorado River might be reactive, and wasn’t aware “that fly ash would help mitigate the reactivity.”

Heath also denied knowledge of an earlier ASR-related lawsuit involving his previous employer. In December 2016, an Austin couple sued Custom-Crete over a pool constructed in early 2012, when Heath served as its general manager. According to the lawsuit, the pool builder and its subcontractors conducted some initial repairs around 2015, but those attempts failed, and a consulting company found that the pool was damaged by ASR, with no fly ash used. (Heath says that while he knew the pool had issues, he had not heard that it had ASR, and he left the company in November 2016, while the investigation was still ongoing.) Jason Lore, who worked at Custom-Crete and is now general manager at SRM Concrete, says Heath was “definitely aware of the situation,” but he was not sure whether Heath knew the pool had been diagnosed with ASR.

Easy Mix sourced the siliceous sand and pea gravel it used in its concrete from quarries along the Colorado River, and it has since filed third-party complaints against its suppliers. Asked whether it tests its rock for reactivity, a representative from quarry Travis Materials, a codefendant in the multidistrict lawsuit, says the tests it performs are the “same that anybody else does” but did not elaborate. Owners of other area quarries did not respond to requests for interviews.

Despite their legal troubles, Easy Mix and other concrete providers implicated in lawsuits still build pool shells. Now, Heath says, his company tests its mix twice a year, which costs a few thousand dollars per test. “Everybody understands the problem now, or the potential now,” he says. “Nobody in their right mind would continue the insanity.”

For many homeowners, it’s too late. The aesthetic focal points of their backyards are eyesores, and when it comes to fixing them, they aren’t sure whom to trust.

Like the concrete companies, many affected pool builders continue working in the industry, some under new or separate companies. A few offer ASR testing, along with demolition and rebuilding services should a test come back positive. Some hawk expensive fixes that experts say at best slow down the reaction. Gregerson nearly forked over $7,000 for an epoxy treatment she was told might extend the life of her pool anywhere from six weeks to a year. A summer of memories with her kids at first seemed worth it, but she changed her mind.

Denise and Shuler Page, retired restaurant owners in Round Rock, want accountability. In 2020 they installed a pool and hot tub, partly to use as therapy for Shuler’s lymphedema and deep vein thrombosis. For a while, it let him cut back on costly out-of-pocket treatments. Then the cracks showed up, and core samples revealed the pool was damaged by ASR.

Though the Pages’ contract included a limited warranty on their pool, the pool company’s insurer denied their claim, and the company’s lawyer told them the business could no longer help, since the amount it had spent trying to repair the pool already exceeded its profit. “They said, ‘We believe it is not our responsibility. It is the vendor’s,’ ” Denise says. “The thing is, we wrote one check, right? That’s like me telling a customer, ‘I’m sorry your steak isn’t good, but that’s the vendor’s fault.’ ”

At the time, the Pages were planning to buy a home in a retirement village 45 minutes away, near their children and grandchildren. But that would require them to sell their current house, and now they can’t get the price they were hoping for. After pulling more than $2 million from their savings to keep their Cajun restaurant open during and after COVID, they don’t have the money to demolish their pool.

Renee Porter, an insurance broker specializing in the pool industry at Higginbotham in Dallas, has been swimming in ASR claims for four years. She says most contractors have general liability insurance that doesn’t cover their work itself, only insuring them for damage resulting from it—say, if a faulty pool floods a basement. But some policies have an exception for work performed by subcontractors, and thanks to that clause, Porter has settled about 15 percent of 126 claims she’s helped file, winning clients between $50,000 and $450,000, with most receiving enough to replace their pools. (The rest of the settlements are contingent on the result of the multidistrict litigation.) A construction-defect claim takes a minimum of six months to process, but that’s less time than a lawsuit is likely to take.

When insurance companies deny claims, homeowners have no recourse other than to sue. Ryan Marquez, director of the Civil Justice Clinic at the University of Houston Law Center, says the state government once had a residential-construction board that reviewed disputes, but it shuttered in 2009. All pool owners have implied warranties under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which stipulates that contractors complete their jobs in a “good and workmanlike” manner. But lawyers’ fees can exceed tens of thousands of dollars. Katy McClendon, a pet groomer who lives in Liberty Hill, thirty miles north of downtown Austin, and suspects her pool of suffering damage from ASR, has spent $5,000 on lawyers in just three months. “Every time we get an email or a phone call or anything, it’s money, money, money,” she says. “Our credit card debt has gone through the roof.”

Gregerson managed to retain a lawyer on contingency after her pool builder’s insurance company denied coverage. She sued the company and its concrete provider, Hot Crete, co-owned by Edgar and Fausto Castro. “Edgar and the Castro family obviously feel terrible for all the homeowners who didn’t get the bargain that they negotiated and paid for,” says Todd Headden, Hot Crete’s lawyer.

In March, Hot Crete filed for bankruptcy. In these situations, Marquez says, all suits are typically paused as the court determines which claims are dischargeable and whether there will be a liquidation of assets. According to Headden, Hot Crete owned an estimated $1.6 million in trucks, trailers, silos, air compressors, and other equipment, but nearly $1 million’s worth already had liens against it. After those debts and the auctioneer are paid, the remainder will go toward the administration of the estate, including legal fees, Headden says. Then “hopefully that trickles down to the creditors,” he says.

Some hope the Texas attorney general’s office will get involved, but even then, Marquez is skeptical about homeowners receiving financial restitution from pool builders or small concrete companies. “How are they going to collect?” he asks. “You can’t squeeze water out of a stone.” But in Hot Crete’s case, the source might not be bone-dry. Headden says Hot Crete had insurance policies that could pay out at least some money to homeowners; he hopes to capture more than $8 million in insurance proceeds that could be distributed by a liquidation trustee to homeowners on a pro rata basis—though not everyone waiting in line might benefit. Some homeowners will “have claims that, for various reasons, are denied, and that’s out of our control,” Headden says. Those could be homeowners whose pools tested negative for ASR or whose claims fall outside the applicable policy term because of a prior work exclusion, though homeowners are able to contest denials, Headden says. He anticipates a trustee could be appointed after New Year’s.

Michael Lovins, an attorney representing Gregerson and plaintiffs in about 25 other Texas ASR cases, confirmed that there’s hope for some insurance money to be distributed. “Our job here is to make the best out of a bad situation,” he says. “Making [the homeowners] whole is extremely unlikely.”

Meanwhile, Gregerson continues writing a $700 monthly check to pay off her home equity loan, which has seven years left on it. She’s now contemplating simply filling in the pool with sandbags and grass. “It’s like a breakup. You just move on,” she says.

Other homeowners want lawmakers to enact legislation to hold companies responsible. Marquez thinks a law requiring a contractor who works on residential properties to have some kind of bond to cover damages might be viable in Texas, since the state’s politicians are generally protective of homesteads.

McIntyre says pool builders are split on the idea of more regulation of their industry. “I don’t think [more regulation] would be a bad idea at all, and that statement I just made is going to garner all kinds of pushback.”

Kelly Ann Seaman, a former Georgetown resident, didn’t want to wait around for change. In 2021, she and her husband undertook a cash-out refinancing of their home to build a $90,000 “monster teenager pool with a swimming lane and a really deep end” for her three kids. They invited forty friends over to break it in. But after the pool started deteriorating, “a lot of people didn’t understand how painful it was,” Seaman says. “Big deal. It’s just a hundred thousand dollars to put in a new one.”

The family put the house on the market, with a disclosure of suspected ASR and $15,000, the amount they’d been quoted to remove the pool, in closing cash. After almost thirty showings, the house sold for $110,000 less than the family had hoped to get. A former neighbor recently told Seaman she heard Jimmy Buffett songs wafting from the backyard as the new owners splashed around in the pool. “I did meet the buyer,” Seaman says, “and he’s like, ‘We feel like we won the lottery. We can’t believe we’re in this neighborhood.’ ”

Seaman and her husband have since moved to Illinois, where they’re trying to focus on the future. Their new house doesn’t have a pool, she says, but it sits beside a lake, which she’s confident won’t leak or collapse. “God,” she says, “made the lake.”