WHY TEXAS
POOLS ARE
FAILING.
In 2018, three Texas coal plants retired and the regional fly ash supply shrank. Mixes changed. Years later, when a shell fails, the question is what went into it, and without a record nobody can say. Here is what changed, and what a record made at the time can show.
THE CHEMISTRY CHANGED.
NOTHING REQUIRED
A RECORD OF IT.
In 2018, three Texas coal fueled power plants retired: Monticello in Titus County, Big Brown in Freestone County and Sandow in Milam County, per EIA generator data.
Those 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. 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.
Three Texas coal plants retire, and the regional fly ash supply shrinks. As supply falls, mixes change. Pool builders keep ordering the mix they have always ordered. Homeowners keep signing contracts.
ASR, the internal expansive reaction often called concrete cancer, works from the inside of the shell outward over years. A shell built with one mix looks exactly like a shell built with another, on the day it is filled and for several years afterward. Families swim in it.
The failures surface later: map cracking, gel at the cracks, tiles that loosen, a shell that loses water. The cracking visible on the surface is the symptom, not the event. Homeowners call their builders. Builders call their concrete suppliers. Every one of them is asking what was actually in the concrete that built the pool. Without a record, a dispute years out is one party's memory against another's.
PSIP Aquatic does not choose the mix. It creates the record of what was actually shot. Version 1 of the PSIP Aquatic record sets eleven stages, the minimum every record holds, from excavation and subgrade to the final shell record, with the batch tickets for each shoot day, photographed, and the builder's notes on the load. The stages are not a construction sequence, the builder may add photographs and notes at any stage, and they will change as PSIP develops. The PSIP app that captures each stage live is coming in App Version 1. No contractor is certified yet, and no PSIP record or certificate exists yet.
WHO DOES WHAT: The contractor builds it. The building department enforces the code. PSIP keeps the record.
WHY A POOL
SHELL IS
EXPOSED.
ASTM publishes methods for testing whether an aggregate is reactive, including ASTM C1260 and ASTM C1293/C1293M.
ASTM C1778, the standard guide for reducing the risk of alkali aggregate reaction, lists supplementary cementitious materials, Class F fly ash among them, as preventive measures where the aggregate is reactive. ASR needs reactive silica, alkalis and moisture. A filled pool shell is never dry.
The compounding factor specific to pool construction: a pool shell is a concrete structure in near constant contact with water, with wet and dry cycling at the waterline.
ASR, SCMs AND
THE BATCH TICKET.
Imagine your concrete is a building. The reactive silica in the aggregate is like a gas leak, it's there from day one, invisible. The alkalis in the cement are the spark. Moisture is the oxygen. If all three are present, the reaction can start. It burns slowly from the inside, and you don't see smoke until the surface shows it, often as map cracking. By then, the fire has been going for years. Whether anything was in the mix to reduce the risk is a fact somebody either wrote down or did not.
An SCM is not the cement. It is blended with the cement, and when it is in the mix it changes how the cement behaves. Fly ash, under ASTM C618, is one. Slag cement, under ASTM C989/C989M, is another. The finished shell does not show which one was in the mix, or whether any was.
A batch ticket is the producer's own record of what was delivered, and it arrives with the truck. Tickets vary, and many do not list everything in the load. That is why a PSIP record holds a photograph of the batch ticket for every delivery, and the builder adds what he knows about the load in the notes, recorded as his own statement. PSIP does not pull values out of the photograph.
THE MATERIALS
ARE STILL
CHANGING.
2.6 GW of coal capacity retired in 2025, per EIA. The cement changed too. USGS reports that blended cement accounted for 63 percent of total United States cement shipments during the first 9 months of 2025, and that 95 percent of those blended shipments were estimated to be portland limestone cement. A mix specified some years ago and reordered by habit is not guaranteed to be the same concrete today. Wherever the materials move and nobody writes down what went in, a failed shell leaves the same question with no answer.
WHAT IS ON
RECORD FOR
YOUR POOL?
THE RECORD
A POOL BUILDER
CAN SHOW
A PSIP CERTIFICATE.
A BATCH TICKET.
A RECORD MADE AT THE TIME.
PSIP Aquatic does not stop a pool from failing. No standard can make that promise. Once certification opens, a PSIP Aquatic record will be built stage by stage as the shell goes in, and the certificate will go to the homeowner once it issues. 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. The institutional architecture is published on the PSIP Independence Standard; the protocol's technical governance passes to the Technical Advisory Council once it is seated, and no seat is filled yet.