Underlying Problems
Thad and Sharon Brown and their children spend a lot of time upstairs in their $600,000 view home in the hills here. The view isn’t necessarily any better, but downstairs, Brown says, is where a cancer is eating away at the very foundation of the house.
Water seeping in through too-porous concrete has soaked the carpet in a guest room and the slab and foundation walls are chipping and flaking away.
The Browns’ house is being attacked by sulfates, and if the couple prevail in a suit scheduled to get underway this week in Orange County, local builders and concrete suppliers are bracing for a slew of litigation that could bring massive damage claims.
Sulfates destroy concrete both by eating up the cement that holds it together and by filling up gaps and air bubbles that occur naturally in concrete and then expanding, literally tearing it apart from internal pressure.
They get into concrete when they are dissolved in water, usually from rain or irrigation runoff, and then soak into the slab or foundation--which looks solid but actually can be very porous.
These days, sulfates shouldn’t be a construction problem because there have been very specific recipes for sulfate-resistant cement in the Uniform Building Code since the late 1970s.
The code, which governs all residential building in California, calls for a low-water content, or “dry,” mix that makes a denser, less porous concrete that sulfates can’t penetrate.
But increasingly, evidence is surfacing that suggests something is rotten in the concrete that was used extensively in sulfate-soil areas of Orange County during most of the past two decades.
The Browns, who say estimates for repairs at their house top $1 million, are among more than 400 homeowners whose claims against builders and concrete companies in Orange County for using substandard concrete in the foundations of their homes have been collected in seven suits.
The homes are in a crescent-shaped swath of land that runs from San Juan Capistrano and Dana Point north through Trabuco Canyon and Chino Hills and then west into the Yorba Linda hills. Sulfates also have been found in the soil in parts of Laguna Niguel and in La Palma and Cypress.
All of the suits have been filed by Newport Beach attorney Kenneth Kasdan, who discovered the sulfate issue in a suit he filed last year for some of the Browns’ neighbors.
Builders and concrete contractors don’t deny that the industry routinely failed to follow the low-water requirements of the building code, but they say it was because the requirements were not widely known. Concrete companies say that they simply supply what the builder asks for and that home builders rarely specified the more expensive mixes with low-water content.
Building foundations aren’t collapsing all over the county, says Les Thomas, president of the Orange County Building Industry Assn. The validity of Kasdan’s allegations, he said, “depend on whether the building code is right.”
But right or not, says Kasdan, it is the law.
The first builder Kasdan sued over sulfate damage has settled the case involving five luxury homes by paying $3.2 million--an average of $620,000 per house. While the suit involved a multitude of construction defects, rotting concrete was a major portion of the claim. The repair costs almost equal the original purchase price of the houses, which were built by developer George L. Argyros’ Brighton Homes in the late 1980s.
In the Brown suit, the second against the same builder, Kasdan is seeking $18 million in damages and says $15 million of it is to literally jack up the homes, rip out their concrete underpinnings and pour all new slabs and foundations.
Brighton is fighting that suit, which is scheduled to go to trial in Orange County Superior Court on Wednesday and faces three other suits from homeowners in the Yorba Linda development and a Brighton development in Trabuco Canyon. The Costa Mesa-based builder has declined to comment.
If Kasdan prevails in court, repair costs could swamp a building industry already weakened by years of recession.
One major concrete subcontractor, who asked not to be identified, said he believes damages “could cost Southern California [builders’] insurance companies as much as the Northridge earthquake.”
“If these cases of Kasdan’s go through, and I believe they will, there are a lot of other [sulfate] suits just waiting to be filed,” the contractor said.
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Sulfate damage can take decades to show up, or can appear quickly, as it has at the Browns’ 7-year-old home.
One of the first visible signs is a chalky white powder or a growth of white crystals on the concrete. But that’s not always a sign of sulfate damage. Other chemicals can cause the same reaction and even properly prepared concrete that is not subject to sulfate erosion can be coated with the white powder.
The only accurate way to find out if sulfate is a problem is to have a professional geotechnical firm or cement laboratory take a core sample of the concrete and analyze it, geotechnical engineer Don Harrington Jr. says.
Homeowners also can seek out soil reports on their properties from their builders or from a city or county building department and can try to track down the record of the concrete used in their foundations, but that is a laborious process that even lawyers sometimes fail to accomplish.
Many of the concrete companies and contractors that were active in the 1970s and ‘80s went out of business when the building recession hit in the early 1990s.
But Thomas Mock, whose family’s concrete company was one of the biggest in those days, says that few in the industry knew about low water cement requirement until very recently.
“I didn’t know it existed and 100% of my competitors didn’t know it existed,” says Mock. The James Mock Inc. concrete company started by his father is one of the firms being sued by Kasdan.
“I’m guilty in that I took for gospel what other people told me,” Mock said. “Instead of looking up all this information myself, I believed the professionals in the building field, the structural engineers, the soils engineers and the concrete ready mix company engineers who told us that the concrete being specified by the builders was in accordance with what was required. And every concrete contractor in Southern California did the same.”
Mock, who now lives in Arizona and is co-owner of an Anaheim concrete firm, said he believes the Brighton homes settlement earlier this year has made the entire industry change its practices. “Now, I’d say, 100% of the concrete being used in sulfate areas has the correct water-cement ratio.”
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But some in the industry aren’t as sure.
James Peterson, a concrete contractor in Riverside whose firm has worked for most of the major Southland builders in recent years, says that he still rarely sees concrete orders that specify a low-water mix.
Yet for nearly two decades, the building code used throughout California has specified that the total weight of the water in concrete mixes for areas with heavy sulfate concentrations cannot exceed the weight of the cement--the blend of materials that actually hardens as the concrete dries to bind the rock and sand into a solid mass.
What Kasdan has discovered in hundreds of concrete mix records he’s subpoenaed is that while builders always ordered the proper type of cement when their soil reports identified moderate or severe sulfate conditions, they rarely if ever specified the water-cement ratio.
And in every case he’s examined, Kasdan says, the concrete plants that supplied the material mixed in too much water.
Richard Hayden, the engineer who designs concrete mixes for Brea-based Transit Mix Concrete, one of the Southland’s biggest ready-mix suppliers, testified in a deposition earlier this year that he never paid attention to the water-to-concrete ratios.
After reviewing the company’s mix formulas, he agreed with the attorneys questioning him that the Transit Mix concretes for sulfate-rich soils appeared to violate the building code specifications.
Hayden tried to recover in testifying that, despite their high water content, his company’s products for high sulfate areas complied with Orange County building code requirements.
But Chi Tran, manager of the county’s building permit division, says the county has required the low-water mixes in high-sulfate areas for more than 10 years and that every city in the county uses the same standard. “It is mandated by the state,” he said.
“That’s the real scandal,” Kasdan says. “As bad as it is that this substandard concrete has been used, the scandal is that no one took responsibility for knowing what was in the building code. It has been there since at least 1979.”
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A state-sponsored study of sulfate problems in Lakewood, Cypress and La Palma reported in 1990 that the foundations of more than 400 homes built in the three-city area in the 1960s and ‘70s had been damaged and that 12 had been destroyed because of sulfate attack.
The study is one of hundreds that have been conducted over the past 50 years as civil engineers tried to find ways to stop deterioration of major concrete structures, such as dams, aqueducts and underground reservoirs.
And over and over, the findings--included in most civil engineering texts and in the American Concrete Institute’s own publications--have been that sulfate eats concrete. As early as 1977, researchers were calling for dense concrete as the best way to protect against sulfate attack.
The federal Bureau of Reclamation, which maintains concrete dams throughout the West, has found that a properly mixed concrete that could withstand sulfates for 130 years has a life expectancy of just 50 years when the water content is boosted too high.
The opening sentences of a report, prepared in the late 1970s by a trade group called the Cement Industry Technical Committee of California, leaves little to the imagination: “The quality of the concrete is of prime importance in the sulfate resistance of concrete. Low water cement ratio and high density concrete is imperative at all sulfate levels.”
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Richard Dietmeier has learned a lot about sulfates and concrete in the past year and wonders why any builder can question the need to use low-water mixes.
He said that specialists who have examined his hillside home in Dana Point since he joined 56 neighbors in a still-pending suit against the builder of the development and the concrete contractors tell him that the foundation of the house is being weakened. “We live in earthquake country,” he says. “What’s going to happen when a big one hits?”
The retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, who bought his house for nearly $500,000 in a 1992 auction, said that a sulfate attack, which began after heavy rains in 1994, is peeling away layer after layer of concrete from the foundation of the house. He tracks the progress of his home’s decay by watching the growth of the whitish crystals that sulfate leaves behind as the water that carries it deep inside the concrete of the foundation evaporates.
“What bothers me most is that the foundation is the core of a house and I’m sitting here with a $500,000 house and a hell of a view of the Pacific and the core is beginning to crack,” Dietmeier says. “Unless we get this stabilized and fixed, this won’t be a half-million-dollar house anymore.”
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Faulty Foundations
Soil with high sulfate levels can destroy certain types of concrete, including those used to build home foundations. Some Orange County homes built as recently as 1988 are weakening and crumbling from beneath. It is likely that thousands of homes are built on foundations susceptible to sulfate damage. How sulfates destroy concrete and what to do about it:
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What Are Sulfates?
* Naturally occurring mineral salts found in soil and ground water.
Destroying Concrete
* When soil becomes wet or damp, sulfates dissolve into the water and seep into porous concrete, where they react with calcium trialuminate. As the sulfate dries, it releases corrosive vapors and leaves behind salt crystals that expand and accumulate, breaking the concrete apart.
Progressive Damage
* As water readily passes through the damaged concrete, it loses its strength and anchor bolts embedded in the foundation begin to rust.
* Weakened anchor bolts could shear off in an earthquake, causing the house to slide off its foundation.
* Eventually, the foundation falls apart and turns to rubble.
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Mixing of Concrete
* Cement: Gray or white powder that hardens to hold concrete together. Can contain additives to control corrosion or add strength.
* Water: Moistens cement powder, makes the cement pourable and helps control the rate at which the concrete cures or hardens.
* Aggregate: Gravel ranging from quarter-inch pea gravel to small rocks of an inch or more in diameter, depending on the use.
* Sand
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Choosing the Right One
* Concrete mixed with Type V cement, which has less calcium trialuminate and a lower water content than other cements. Building codes specify a water to cement balance of 50-50 for moderate sulfate conditions. For severe conditions, an even drier ratio of 45% water weight to 55% cement weight must be used. Sulfate-resistant cement is stronger, denser and less porous.
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Where to Look for Damage
* Garage slabs, which are usually constructed without a moisture barrier.
* Garage foundations, especially stem walls, an area that sticks up between the ground and the mud sill.
* Patio
* Driveway
* Pools and spas
* Outside house, especially around stem walls.
* Inside house (under carpet)
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Preventing Problems
* Get a soil report: Builders are required to have an analysis performed on the soil and the results should be on file at city or county building agencies. You can ask your builder for a copy of the report, or you can track down where it is filed. Keep in mind that these efforts have proved difficult or unsuccessful for others.
* Have your soil tested: Take three samples of your soil from various spots near or under your home’s foundation. Have them tested at the county Environmental Management Agency’s materials laboratory. Note: Geotechnical firms are equipped to obtain accurate samples underneath the house and will have an analysis performed for you.
* Have your cement analyzed: Have a geotechnical firm obtain a core sample of your home’s foundation. They will lift the carpet up in an inconspicuous spot such as the floor of a closet and bore through to the foundation. A sample will be taken and analyzed.
Source: Law firm of Kasdan, Simonds, McIntyre, Epstein, & Martin; Harrington Geotechnical; Researched by JANICE L. JONES/Los Angeles Times
