Tainted Chinese drywall must be removed from over 3000 homes in U.S.

I am very sorry for homeowners and the contractors who installed the terrible drywall. But for the grace of luck, there go I as a homeowner who has remodelled many places, and a designer who is generally sympathetic to contractors, at least the honest ones I've worked with, and I'm sympathetic to purveyors who didn't know the drywall was bad. It's a pretty depressing scenario.

a few people trying to make a little more money for themselves dishonestly have the ability to do a lot a damage. as we have seen with the Chinese even to kill.

Since all drywall is made from gypsum and only the Chinese drywall is giving off the acid and the H2S, Im believing that this stuff has a potential to "go anaerobic" like compost that is piled high and left to just rot without air. So, Im further guessing that there is some other stuff and some sewer water or other mung in the gypsum mixture itself. Many Chinese products contain toxic stuff and poisonous fillers, could this be another melanine case?

Consequently, under an innocent purchaser implied contract, (there is some precedent in environmental impairment liability), the homeowners, "big box" stores, and installers, as a class, could sue the various insurance companies and claim recompense, and probably win, since the policies dont seem to have any "exclusions" except for normal things like timely claims etc.

I dont think they know....NPR reported just last Nov that a team was finally heading to china to investigate. I think I remember hearing that the Chinese government stonewalled requests to visit China for this purpose for many months. At this late date, and with the legal action against China I Dont know that we ever find out.

WQe have a related problem in the Chester Valley of Pa. They grow mushrooms there and their compost recipes have a great deal of shredded gyp board in there. It provides bulk and keeps the compost from getting too slippery for front end loaders. When they pull the spent compost out of the mushroom houses, they pile it up ad it undergoes anaerobic digestion. The sulfur reducing bacteria then turn the gypsum to H2S and the entire 20 mile area smells like a shithole during the winter mushroom crop season. Big piles of steaming compost and the fuckin mushroom growers wont change their recipes. They could easily use something else besides gyp board. The only reason they use it is because its free .

I can imagine how the same thing happens oin a closed space of a house with this bad gyp board. Bummer. Were redoing our studio building and Im gonna put up drywall in the common area. Im only gonna buy Canadian gyp board because I used to do consulting for several of the gypsum mines in Nova SCotia, and mostly cause they keep it really clean.

You mean. . . ? Let me check my understanding. You buy a house and insure it. For the five (for ex.) years, you are consecutively insured by the same company, and all of a sudden, what was covered in year two is not covered in year five, and that thing that was covered in year two becomes a preexisting condition even though it used to be covered? Have I followed what you said?

What a bunch of crooks.

Why do we continue to buy things made in China when they're defective, stuffed full of products we don't allow, and fall apart within a month?

You may say 'because their stuff is cheaper', but it's been proven otherwise, what with the recalls and do-overs. It's not cheaper. We should boycott their products.

For the reasons I listed above (and others), I consciously try not to buy China's products, but it's damn hard to find anything not made by them. Pisses me off.

There are many power tools masde under the Black and Decker name which are made especially in China. They have lower wattage and are flimsier than the more "higher end" lines. These are sold (I believe) exclusively at Wally Mart. Ive never bought any but I always look at the specs on the box and its amazing what were being sold. I dont think we get any final food products from China but we do buy ingredients that are mafd and bulk packed for our food mfrs.

Like the contaminated cat food and possibly baby formula.
The brand of capitalism in China today is much like the unbridled yahoo capitalism of the "gilded age" in The US and Europe when there were no labor laws, child labor laws, hours and fair wage laws, health in the workplace requirements and environmental and public health concerns. Ive always said that industries without regulation, will always **** us over one way or another. China is at the entry level of modern civilization

off subject, I have heard and believe it to be true that walmart gets major brand owners of all kinds of mechanical things to make products especially for walmart, but below normal quality. I found this out when I was trying to figure out why so many microwaves ovens I bough were ****. The normal brand warranty still holds, I always got new ones for nothing, but the hassle was pissing me off. I now refuse to buy such things at walmart.

Likewise, Costco gets manufactures to make stuff just for them, but with costco it is not quality that is cheapened, what they do is remove some features so as to make it less expensive to make.

Didnt know about Costco. How does the mmanufacturer of the appliance or tool sleep at night?

I don't have inside information on walmart, but I have bought towels at Sams, and have the hems fray within six months. This was a major and respected brand.

ya, walmart hammers away a price, get it lower, then lower again. At some point the only way to do this is to spend less making what ever it is, because the manufacturers profit per piece is almost down not nothing already.

SO the deal is (I hear, dont ask me to prove it) that they use name brands so that people think that they are getting good stuff, use the normal warranty so that people dont get tipped off that they are buying inferior products, and then because warranty costs will go up Walmart then chips in part (I have heard romour that it is actually all) of the warrenty service cost. The payoff is supposed to be that a lot of people will never or rarely use the product, or will sell it to someone else, and in these cases no warranty claim will be made. Also, a lot of people decide that dealing with the warranty is too much work, they take the loss.

Both walmart and the manufactures bet that even if the customer is not happy they will still buy the next time at walmart, because the price is so much cheaper. This is a long demonstrated fact with our airline choices, we bitch constantly about the product, but the company who offers the better product and thus needs to charge more losses. This is because when we go to buy a ticket if one is much cheaper we will take it, even if we had a bad experience on the airline last time....we may say different, but when push comes to shove we buy on price.

That's me. No way am I going through the hassle of returning a defective bath towel. Anyway, who saves the receipts for low dollar crap like that.

Actually, I once returned a non functioning phone extention to Radio Shack. I didn't have the receipt, so the guy asked if I were sure it was from Radio Shack. I said 'Sure. It doesn't work, does it?" He bought the logic.

exactly, and in the modern age when most people use a debit card and thus the proof of purchase is sitting on a walmart computer somewhere , which could be recalled by swiping the debit card and checking the walmosrt computer to see if and when we purchased the item, no way is walmart going to do that for us.

There is way too much money to be lost doing that.

You mean. . . ? Let me check my understanding. You buy a house and insure it. For the five (for ex.) years, you are consecutively insured by the same company, and all of a sudden, what was covered in year two is not covered in year five, and that thing that was covered in year two becomes a preexisting condition even though it used to be covered? Have I followed what you said?

What a bunch of crooks.

=====================

Homeowners/Property Insurance is not the same thing as Medical Insurance. The Homeowners policy is supposed to cover Property Damage - as in repairs to your property. It is not a Liability policy (illness, medical claims, etc.) Your health insurance is supposed to cover that.

For a Homeowners policy (HO3) all perils are insured unless specifically excluded. Environmental cover is a liability exposure and would be excluded. Environmental is also specifically excluded from Personal Liability insurance (if you have one of those policies).

It is not that the insurance companies are crooks, it is that they never intended to cover Environmental Exposure and if it is an HO3 policy then they may be specifically excluding Chinese Drywall (when repairs are needed to the structure of the building) when it becomes public knowledge or becomes a large risk.

There is no huge pool of money belonging to insurance carriers that they can draw from continuously to cover anything and everything. They are in business to make money and they have to underwrite their business or they will go out of business. And yes I know how hated insurers are, just like Banks, Mortgage Companies, Wall Street, etc., but without them no-one can own anything (house, car) or do anything (go into business for themselves, travel, etc.) for the worry of losing everything with one simple mistake. Really the insurers would be less needed if we weren't such a litigious society with courtrooms and lawyers to beat the band.

Also the government cannot just keep putting their hands in their pockets to bail out or back these insurers when the **** hits the fan. It's a catch 22 situation. I wish we all really didn't need as much insurance as we do but with some measure of wealth, comes increased risk and worry about losing it. This is the society we live in.

I was starting to think similarly but not as sharply, farmerman.

Yikes. (H2S not good for you, is it?)

Very toxic stuff. Fortunately, it is easy to smell in small quantities. Oddly, in high concentrations, it can't be smelled. That's why well servicing crews in my area are issued some pretty expensive meters to detect the stuff. A well infected with the right bacteria produces hydrogen sulfide. It's also destructive the the tubing inside the well, and steel rope used in some servicing operations.

Most of the Chinese Drywall (CDW) came into the country in 2004 and 2005 when a series of hurricanes drove up the price of drywall.

Most of the CDW was used in new construction in 2004, 2005, and 2006 in FL, the Gulf states and Virginia.

Once the hurricanes drove up the price of drywall, huge builders like Lennar looked for another, cheaper market: Enter the Chinese with distribution through a German-Chinese joint venture.
There was no reason for these builders to suspect that the drywall was tainted in this manner.

Homeowner policies during this three year period did not specifically exclude CDW...they didn't have to. Not only are there several standard exclusions that apply, the fundamental insuring agreement isn't triggered.

The policy covers the policyholder for accidental damage caused by defined perils. Even an "all risk" policy requires that there be a specific occurrence, not excluded.

You buy a house which was built with CDW and after a while it begins to smell, and after a while it begins to corrode your pipes and wiring.

What was the occurrence?

You buying the house?

The contractor using CDW before you bought the house?

The Chinese doing whatever they did to produce a defective product?

You buy insurance for your car. If you find out that the manufacturer used defective materials and after 4 months your seats dissolve into sludge. Do you think your auto insurer should pay to replace the seats?

The bad actors in all this are the Chinese manufacturers, but they are going to skate. Especially with a White House that is increasingly pandering to our largest debt holder.

The builders are, and rightly so, going to argue that there was no reason for them to suspect the defect.

The people who bought these homes with CDW are royally screwed and it sucks, but sometimes things like this happen. If for some reason you can't make the guilty party pay, you don't make the next available guy pay.

Maybe the US government should step in and help these folks. Maybe not. A public debate would help.

Instead, what will happen is that vote hungry politicians (and this includes State judges) will abuse their power and do whatever they can to make th next available guy pay.

And here's what will happen next:

Insurance companies will raise their rates for all of us to cover the losses their prior rates were never calculated to address.

Insurance companies will go out of business because they have to pay losses they never imagined they would have to, and the same politicians won't let them raise their rates. Friends and neighbors will lose their jobs and the capacity for taking risk will shrink; driving up the price of insurance.

But the ignorant and ill-informed will exult in the "fact" that the greedy insurance companies got theirs.

I see no difference between this and all the class action suits that have resulted from the urea formaldehyde cases or the asbestos cases.
In each of these the insurance companies were eventually held to cover the casualty losses. The courts had defined that a casualty loss doesnt necessarily have to go off with a bang.

Lest face it, the job of an insurance company is to collect your premium money to insure you in the event of a casualty loss, and then argue with you so that it will never be required to pay out . Ive been involved in mining claims cases to insurance companies to cover environmental damages for which my clients had payed to "make everyone affected whole". The insurance companies will spend bazillions on lawyers to fight the claims in court. MAny times the actual cases waste more money than if the insurance companies had payed up in the first place.
Please dont play the fiddle for the insurance companies. They define the risks in the policy and any addenda. To deny coverage for some bozo "hardshiop crap" is close to fraud.

Youve got no fan of insurance companies here, Ive been in too many depositions where the insurance "experts" will lie through their teeth in the hopes that they can maximize their fees .