Home Foundations Are Crumbling: Could Yours Be Next?
Home Foundations Are Crumbling: Could Yours Be Next?
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It all started with a pop or a crack—the typical sounds of a house settling. Only over hours and days, the creaking continued, growing louder and more insistent. The noise prompted over 300 northeastern Connecticut residents to call area structural engineer Bill Neal to see what was up. His prognosis? Their home foundations were inexplicably crumbling from under their feet.
“I’ve had to tell people that they could not stay in the house anymore, which is devastating,” Neal told realtor.com® in an interview. “And eventually many more will end up in the same boat—I’d guess 10,000 to 20,000.”
The culprit is a mineral found at high levels within the foundations’ concrete called pyrrhotite, which can swell when it reacts with oxygen and water. This faulty material has been traced to Becker’s Quarry in Willington, CT, and concrete supplier J.J. Mottes, which has discontinued distribution. Still, since 1982, this quarry has helped build an estimated 20,000 homes in this middle- and working-class region of Connecticut. And now the oldest ones are beginning to collapse.
That means that many more built more recently—even within the past year—could eventually collapse years or decades down the road.
Worse yet, many insurance companies are saying they won’t cover the cost of these repairs because they’re contractually obligated to cover only an “abrupt” house collapse. Homeowners fought back by filing a class-action lawsuit, but until that’s resolved, they are stuck paying to replace their foundation themselves, ranging in price from $150,000 to $300,000.
While this nightmare seems so far confined to a corner of Connecticut, many are wondering: Might their homes be next?
Odds are no, because pyrrhotite is rarely found in rock quarries, although the mineral is widespread in Quebec, Canada, causing thousands of homes there to collapse since the 1970s.
All of which certainly underscores the need for homeowners to do their due diligence before they buy a place by hiring a home inspector, particularly to check out the foundation—pretty much the most difficult and expensive of all home repairs.
As for Connecticut home buyers worried about pyrrhotite, they can hire a petrographer to test the foundation for this mineral—which could be a good idea, since “home inspectors will notice cracks in foundation, but foundation with pyrrhotite could look fine for decades before those cracks form.”
Oh, and check your home insurance contract carefully to see what it expressly says will be—and won’t be—covered.
All in all, one can never be too safe or circumspect when purchasing a home—as Neal points out. “You don’t know how terrible it is to have people break down and cry, their dreams shot, because they can’t live in or sell their house. It’s unbelievable, the human suffering. I have nightmares about it.”
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