TEXAS PAID THE PRICE FIRST.
THE NEXT BILLS ARRIVE
IN 2027 AND 2028.
Texas already paid the price for the 2018 supply collapse. Two more major retirements arrive in 2027 (Coleto Creek) and 2028 (J.K. Spruce Unit 1). The Cody Pools insurance cases, currently pending in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, will set the coverage precedent for every Texas pool builder. If the silica exclusion is upheld, documentation of non-reactive aggregate at the point of pour becomes the line between insured and uninsured work.
Texas lost the trio in 2018. More closures arrive 2027 and 2028.
The Texas coal landscape is the chemistry root event for the entire rolling-chemistry doctrine. In 2018, three plants retired in the same year. The regional fly ash supply contracted in a way Wave A documents as the founding shock. The pattern is not closed. The next regional bills arrive in 2027 and 2028.
- 2018: Monticello, Big Brown, and Sandow retired. The regional collapse Wave A documents as the chemistry root event.
- 2027: Coleto Creek scheduled coal retirement (Vistra, near Goliad).
- 2028: J.K. Spruce Unit 1 slated to stop burning coal, the next outright Texas coal retirement (CPS Energy board action, 23 January 2023).
- W.A. Parish: No retirement date set. Former Petra Nova CCS pilot site (CCS operation shut down 2020).
The next regional fly ash shock arrives 2027 to 2028 in South and Central Texas.
The federal courts in Western District of Texas are writing the precedent.
The Cody Pools litigation is not one case. It is two distinct federal actions, both pending in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, both addressing whether commercial general liability insurance covers ASR-related pool damage. Three carriers are named across the two cases. The cases will be read together as the Texas pool ASR coverage record.
Amerisure Insurance Company v. Cody Pools, Inc.
Docket 1:24-cv-00786, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. Amerisure seeks declaratory judgment that its policies do not cover ASR-related pool damage. The carrier is asking the court to confirm, in advance, that the pool failures sweeping Central Texas fall outside the policy language.
Continental Insurance Co. and National Fire Insurance Co. of Hartford v. Cody Pools, Inc.
Docket 1:24-cv-01410-RP, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. The carriers seek a declaratory judgment that their policies exclude coverage for property damage arising from the presence of silica, the key component in concrete and the chemistry root of ASR. Cody Pools' response alleges bad faith, arguing the carriers represented that coverage existed for ASR-detected pools and then reneged after claims were filed.
What the cases will decide. If the silica exclusion is upheld, every Texas pool builder and concrete contractor operating after the ruling will need to document non-reactive aggregate at the point of pour to preserve coverage. The protocol layer becomes a coverage-preservation document, not a marketing claim. If the silica exclusion is rejected, insurers will revise policy language statewide. New language will likely tighten ASR-specific exclusions with new wording. The same documentation discipline applies under different policy text.
Either outcome moves the contractor of record from covered by default to covered if documented.
August 2023 consolidation. Over one hundred ASR lawsuits.
In August 2023, the Texas Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation consolidated the ASR lawsuits into a single pretrial court in Travis County. The MDL has grown to more than one hundred cases. The MDL is the procedural backbone behind the wave of Central Texas pool-owner mass actions that began surfacing in 2024. The two Cody Pools federal cases live alongside the MDL as the coverage-side companion to the underlying liability-side claim wave. Reading the two streams together is how the Texas pool ASR record is now structured at the institutional level.
Cody Pools is one defendant. Hundreds of pool owners. Multiple firms.
July 2024 reporting from Community Impact and Texas Monthly documented hundreds of Central Texas pool owners filing suit over ASR concrete cancer defects. Cody Pools is one of the larger named defendants but is not the only one. The Central Texas pool-builder defendant set is multiple firms, all facing parallel claim patterns. KB Custom Pools filed for bankruptcy under the weight of the claim cluster, a structural signal that the financial exposure across the Central Texas pool-builder market is not theoretical.
The claim pattern reads as a multi-year claim wave rather than a closed historical event. The 2018 chemistry root event continues to produce field failures on the two-to-four-year pool ASR symptom timeline.
Coverage preservation runs through point-of-pour documentation.
PSIP-certified contractors specify the supplementary cementitious material strategy in writing before the mix is ordered. They document the non-reactive aggregate verification at the point of pour. The batch ticket is captured against the mix design. The closeout packet documents the ash source, the chemistry on the day of the pour, and the climate-day conditions the slab or pool shell will live in. The protocol is structurally independent of every material supplier. PSIP scores. PSIP does not recommend products.