Imagine building a house and getting a callback years later about a flawed foundation. Not a crack, but a failing foundation so riddled with flaws that the entire house is compromised. Repairs, which amount to a complete foundation replacement, would cost in the hundreds of thousands. That’s exactly what is happening in what is virtually our backyard here at Fine Homebuilding. Mostly contained on the other side of our small state of Connecticut, in a range of towns, are dozens of homes that have all had, or still have, the same problem. Besides their relative proximity, the one commonality all of these homes have is the foundations were all poured between the early 1980s and late 199os by the J.J. Mottes Company, a concrete from Stafford Springs, Conn.
The suspected culprit is a pyrrhotite contamination in the concrete mix. The pyrrhotite essentially rusts, which expands and breaks the concrete. Click here to watch the video from NBC Connecticut.
