AMERICAN
CONCRETE
IS FAILING.
Pools across Central Texas are failing, built in the years after the regional fly ash supply shrank in 2018. This is not bad luck. The materials changed, and no layer existed to record what was placed and done at the pour, in a form that survives.
Concrete fails.
Cracking is one common visible symptom of concrete failure. Spalling and scaling are the breakdown and chipping away of a concrete surface, and across the Sun Belt they are frequently a larger concern than cracking. Alkali silica reaction is an internal expansive reaction between reactive silica in the aggregate and alkalis in the cement paste, and it is the most serious mechanism of the three.
Every term used on this page is defined once, as a standalone sentence, in the PSIP definitions. What a record of a pour holds is set out at the documented pour.
Physics does not change by zip code.
PSIP was developed in Tennessee. The stages a PSIP record holds are the same in every state. What changes from state to state is the climate, and the record holds the conditions on the day: the pour day conditions on a concrete record, the conditions at the shell on a pool record.
The standards exist to address these conditions. ACI 318 and ACI 332 specify exposure class. ACI PRC-305-20 covers hot weather concreting. ACI PRC-306-16 covers cold weather concreting. The standards are correct. The standards are not enforced on the slab in front of your house on the day it is poured.
PSI is an output, never an input.
Exposure class is the input. ACI 318 and ACI 332 categories F0 to F3 for freeze-thaw, S0 to S3 for sulfate exposure, W0 to W2 for water, and C0 to C2 for chloride. The categories match the mix to the conditions it will actually face.
Strength, water-cement ratio, air content, and SCM strategy all follow from the exposure class. PSI is one output among many. It is never the input.
When concrete fails, there is no record.
No batch ticket on file. No pre-pour checklists. No closeout packets. The batch ticket already exists on an ordinary residential pour, and nothing in the ordinary process puts a copy in your hands. When concrete fails, there is no record of what was done. Without a record, a dispute years out is one party's memory against another's.
ASTM Committee C09 was established in 1914. For over a century, C09 has defined how concrete is specified, mixed, sampled, tested, and accepted in the United States. The standards are technically complete. ASTM does not enforce the standards in the field. ASTM was never designed to enforce the standards in the field. The committee writes the rules. The committee does not document whether the rules were followed on the slab in front of your house on the day it was poured.
The American Concrete Institute publishes ACI 318. The gap is structural. It is the absence of a layer the American concrete industry never built.
Texas pools and concrete cancer.
4,273 megawatts of Texas coal capacity retired in 2018: Monticello, Big Brown and Sandow, per EIA generator data. Those plants did not only generate electricity. They generated fly ash. Class F fly ash, the low calcium ash, had long been used in Texas concrete to reduce the risk of alkali-silica reaction.
When the plants closed, the regional fly ash supply shrank. A ready-mix producer facing that smaller supply had two paths. Reformulate the mix with an alternative supplementary cementitious material, or place concrete without it.
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.
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.
The Texas failures are the most visible recent example. They are not the only example. They are the visible edge of a structural gap in American concrete construction.
A new cement chemistry, the same order.
According to USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026, blended cement accounted for 63 percent of total United States cement shipments during the first 9 months of 2025, and 95 percent of those blended shipments were estimated to be portland limestone cement, ASTM C595/C595M Type 1L. The transition from Type I to Type 1L is a chemistry change. In Type 1L, finely ground limestone replaces a portion of the clinker. The reactivity is different. The water demand is different. The behavior with admixtures is different. The behavior in cold weather is different.
A crew ordering the mix it has always ordered can receive a materially different cement. Nothing in the ordinary paperwork of a residential pour is designed to surface a change at the cement level.
The Type 1L transition and the fly ash supply that shrank in 2018 have the same shape. In both cases a material moved underneath a specification, the specification was reused because reuse is normally good practice, and the finished concrete does not show which version it received. A national materials transition is exactly the situation a documented pour is for. Not because anybody did anything wrong, but because when the inputs move and the record does not, the ability to answer a question three years later moves with them.
The record closes the gap.
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 on a PSIP record 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.