Construction Law

Chinese Drywall - The Problem

I am in Florida at the first ever Chinese Drywall Litigation conference and will be live blogging the event. Scott Weinstein, managing partner of Morgan and Morgan (Ft. Meyers Florida) opened today?s seminar and provided a history of the Chinese drywall problem.

It is believed that the defective drywall was imported from china from 2004 ? 2007. Homeowners in 41 states suspect they have Chinese drywall. Since 2006 more than 550 million pounds of drywall were imported from China which is enough to build tens of thousands of homes and Florida seems to be the epicenter of the problem since 60% of the imported drywall came in through Florida ports. 115,000 pounds of Chinese drywall entered into the United States through the Port of Miami alone. It is estimated that 36,000 homes in Florida were built with defective drywall.

According to Scott, in his experience working with homeowners who have a home constructed with Chinese drywall, any kind of metal that gets wet (copper pipes, air conditioning coils, etc.) will immediately begin to corrode. Scott was nice enough to bring with him a piece of Chinese drywall that has been removed from the home of one of his clients. The piece was passed around to the conference attendees and the smell of the sulfur was very noticeable. This one little piece of drywall smelled pretty bad ? how bad is the smell of a home that is made entirely of this stuff?

Full post as published by Construction Litigation Law Blog on June 04, 2009 (boomark / email).