Hot take: A job in Boise made me switch from steel to fiberglass rebar

We were putting up a small office building near the river and the soil report said high chloride levels, so the engineer on site, a guy named Frank, told me to look at the old concrete curb out front that was crumbling after just five years. He pointed at the rust stains and said, 'That's your steel rebar giving up, this whole area eats it for breakfast.' I switched the order that afternoon. Has anyone else run into soil that bad and what did you do about the foundation?

3 comments

3 Comments

alex_taylor1022d agoTop Commenter

Frank's right, that soil is brutal. We had a warehouse slab near a salt storage yard do the same thing, just turned to powder.

victor1011mo ago

Yeah, that "eats it for breakfast" line from Frank is dead on. I mean, we had a parking garage slab near a coastal highway that looked like swiss cheese after a decade, all from salt spray. The whole bottom mat was just gone. We started using epoxy coated rebar there, but even that chips. Now for anything near water or roads they salt, I push for fiberglass too. It costs more up front but you're not tearing up the floor in fifteen years.

joseph5291mo ago

Exactly! I saw the same thing on a condo balcony job last year. The salt air just turns regular rebar into dust. We chipped back the spalled concrete and the bars snapped with barely any pressure. Fiberglass rebar is the only thing that makes sense now for those spots, even with the higher cost. It's not worth the call back when the client's concrete is falling apart a few years later.