TEXAS. THE 2018 RETIREMENTS
AND THE MISSING RECORD.
The regional fly ash supply shrank in 2018, when three Texas coal plants retired. The plants that closed are on the public record. What went into a given pool shell is on the record only if somebody kept one.
Texas lost the trio in 2018. All three in one year.
The three plants did not only generate electricity. They generated fly ash, long used in mixes to reduce the risk of ASR. When the plants closed, the regional supply of that material shrank sharply.
The supply changed. The paperwork did not.
This is not about anyone's bad faith. There was no requirement anywhere in the chain to document that the chemistry had changed. Not on the batch ticket. Not in the contract. Not at the pour. The pour proceeded and the paperwork looked the same as it had the year before.
Concrete does not report its own chemistry. It reports it later, when it fails. In pool shells across Central Texas, alkali silica reaction has been reported doing exactly that.
When a shell is questioned, a builder with no batch ticket and no record made at the time is answering with memory instead of evidence.
What a record made at the pour shows.
On a concrete pour, a PSIP record holds the specified mix design, the cement type, and the supplementary cementitious material by type, or that none is specified, as the contractor states them at setup, before placement. On a pool shell, it holds the batch tickets for each shoot day, the delivery method, wet shotcrete or dry gunite, and the nozzle operator by name, as the builder states it. Every batch ticket is photographed, and the photograph records what the ticket shows. Tickets vary, and many do not list everything in the load, so the contractor adds what he knows in the notes, as his own statement. PSIP records the work and certifies that it was recorded. The contractor is responsible for local building codes, permits and licensing. PSIP certification is not an inspection, a code approval or a warranty. No material supplier can pay for a say in PSIP, and PSIP does not recommend products.