Pool Replastering and Plaster Repair in La Marque, Texas

Plaster repair or a full pool replaster

Universal White Cement, a white cement maker, calls delaminating plaster a bond failure rather than a cosmetic flaw: the finish is coming away from the shell or the bond coat, and in time that turns into pop-offs, hollow areas and bigger tear-outs. It calls delamination usually a process problem, not a cement problem, and lists the causes: dust, laitance, paint, loose old plaster, algae or scale left on the shell; the wrong bond coat, thin coverage or a dirty surface under it; cold joints where work stopped and started again; and thin layers of plaster stacked over a marginal old finish. How far the hollow areas reach is what decides between a patch and a full replaster, and that is the first thing measured at the estimate.

Look-alikes that aren't delamination

The same maker separates the problems that can pass for it. Surface spalling is the top cream layer breaking away from water chemistry or freeze-thaw while the plaster underneath stays bonded; etched plaster feels soft, chalky or pitted; scale is mineral buildup sitting on the surface; and calcium nodules are small mounds, or "volcanoes", that exude calcium and may or may not sit over a true void. Sorting one from another comes before any talk of repair.

Water chemistry and the finish

The National Plasterers Council's bulletin on chemical etching ties each water problem to its own damage: low calcium hardness dissolves calcium compounds and discolors the finish, low pH dissolves the material generally, high stabilizer combines dissolving with leaching and fades pigment, and direct contact with certain chemicals can discolor a finish, trap water and alter its pigment.

The City's rule on a pool in good repair

La Marque's amendment to the property maintenance code requires swimming pools to be kept clean, sanitary and "in good repair", and it deems a pool unsanitary when its water is black or green or holds algae or other plants.

Verland soil and the drain-down before a replaster

The soil mapped at La Marque's Census center point is Verland silty clay loam, rarely flooded and somewhat poorly drained, and the USDA's data put its water table as close as 31 centimeters, about 12 inches, to the surface at some point in the year. Verland swells moderately near the surface and more below it: its linear extensibility is 4.5 percent in the top layer and reaches 7.5 percent within 5 feet, in the high class. The USDA rates it very limited for house foundations, citing flooding, the saturated zone and shrink-swell, and very limited for shallow digging. Other streets can sit on other soils.

One safeguard against groundwater pressing up under a pool is a hydrostatic relief valve in the floor; Hayward's threads into the 1½-inch or 2-inch opening inside a main drain sump, with a slotted collector tube at the bottom of the sump. A contractor writing for the American Shotcrete Association describes other ways to keep groundwater down while a pool is empty: a sump pump in a pit near the pool's base, well points around the pool drawn down by a vacuum pump, and French drains, gravel trenches with a perforated pipe, with the pumped water sent away from the pool. No La Marque rule on where drained pool water may go turned up in the City's code, so that question goes to the City as well.

Highlands, Buttermilk Station and La Marque

The community was first known as Highlands, probably for nearby Highland Creek, the Handbook of Texas records, and during the Civil War it was called Buttermilk Station, after soldiers who bought buttermilk there on the trip between Galveston and Houston. It was renamed in the 1890s, when residents learned of another mainland town called Highlands, and postmistress Madam St. Ambrose chose La Marque, French for "the mark". Four railroads reached it by 1914, when it had 500 people, and it had 1,500 people and ninety businesses by 1952. Growing together with Texas City, it became a home for workers at a nearby Union Carbide plant and other plants in the area and at the Galveston Island Medical Center, with 17,000 residents in 1977.