LAKEWAY, Texas — Lakeway voted to amend its pool permitting ordinances to ease the financial burden for residents with the pool defect called alkali-silica reaction, also known as ASR or "concrete cancer."
It's a pool defect potentially impacting thousands of Central Texas pools, making them unusable. It has put pool builders and concrete providers out of business.
Until recently, many people did not know about it, and most of those impacted say they have not been getting help.
Deborah Conner's backyard in Lakeway looks like perfection, but the pool is quickly turning into an ugly situation.
"[Cracks are coming] up the middle of the spa, and then we have crisscrossing inside of the spa at this point," Conner said.
Conner's two-year-old pool is cracking, failing and will eventually be unusable because of ASR.
Experts say this defect could impact pools built between 2017 and later.
"This is a real problem, and at least as a municipality, we can help our residents," Lakeway Mayor Thomas Kilgore said.
Kilgore and Director of Building and Development Erin Carr said like most people, they heard about ASR a year-and-a-half ago from some residents.
"It became more frequent, and at a recent community event, I had a number of residents who saw that I was addressing it with one of their neighbors. And suddenly I had a small community outreach program," Kilgore said.
Kilgore said after meeting with engineers, pool builders and manufacturers, they learned roughly 80 to 100 residents in Lakeway could have pools with ASR. Because the defect takes time to show itself, some of them may not know.
This defect cannot be fixed. The only option is to demolish the pool and rebuild if you choose.
"We, as a city, can amend our ordinance and amend the process to allow the homeowner to get back on with the process of building their pool or fixing it," Kilgore said.
On Monday, Aug. 19, the Lakeway City Council voted to amend its pool permitting ordinance to make the process a little cheaper for those impacted. An option is to reopen the existing pool permits, instead of charging the $1,050 fee again. They are also looking at waiving some inspections if possible.
"There's an inspection they shouldn't need to really have, which is a pool barrier or a fence inspection," Carr said. "The barrier should already be there."
It's a small dent in Conner's price to rebuild. She said she paid about $160,000, and experts said the entire process could cost double or even triple the original cost. She hasn't decided if she will rebuild, but she's happy someone is stepping up and at least trying to help.
"It's devastating when you've built something, spent a lot of money on it and then it fails and you're stuck without a way out," Conner said. "The insurance companies seem to pass you from the pool builder's insurance to the concrete insurance, and you're just stuck in the middle."
Kilgore hopes other cities follow suit and educate their residents.
"My hope is that we can establish a standard that other people might want to emulate. I think we've been very good with the builders themselves in that we're approaching this as it's a community problem that needs a community solution," Kilgore said.
Experts say ASR happens when concrete isn't mixed correctly and lacks a material called fly ash. Water actually makes the concrete expand and crack and then become unusable.
Can the city require testing before pouring the concrete?
As far as the industry can tell, the issue was limited to three separate shotcrete providers and potentially three to four different quarries.
There are hundreds of active lawsuits to figure out who started this problem.
Mayor Kilgore said because the issue is a multi-county problem, it might be a problem for the state Legislature to fix, but they are seeing what they can do as well.
"I would defer that to our city attorney, but we are looking to see what external licensing or testing requirements, a home-rule [the] city might be able to apply," Kilgore said. "But it's much more likely that it would be a state legislative fix given that it's larger commerce than just our small town."