When Chinese products reach the headline bar, you know they are faulty. Actually, even if a piece of China news fails to report a casualty number in the headline you know it's still bad news. Chinese products have long been the target of bad quality news.
I wouldn't normally pick up on this, but if this piece is true imported Chinese drywalls are ridiculously bad.
How bad? Try a chemical reaction which smells terrible and gets worse with heat and humidity. This is followed up by difficulty breathing, coughing and nosebleeds. Oh, and it will damage electrical wiring.
This material has been popular in Louisiana and Florida, used in rebuilding the devastation hurricane Katarina left behind. There are over 1300 complaints now. Those people sure get kicked hard when they try to get back up.
Just to make sure the people stay down when they are knocked down, some insurance companies have started dropping policies for customers whose houses have Chinese drywall installed.
Selling the house is not an option while it's defective and even if you remove the drywall and install a non-toxic one you still have to disclose that this has been done to the prospective buyers.
So what about suing someone? Well, the Chinese sell the drywall to a company in Germany who then sells to US. It's an international issue that will have to be solved in The International Court in The Hague. Good luck getting money from there.
Yes, there is a way to get a compensation in US, but this requires proving your house is contaminated and then following correct court approved procedure to fix the problem. The problem here is no such procedure has been approved in Florida or Louisiana.
Here's the original AP article:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091026/ap_on_re_as/as_china_us_drywall
Baltimore Sun writes of the insurance policies being dropped here:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/real-estate/bal-re.drywall25oct25,0,1232906.story
St. Tammany News has the info on the court problems:
http://www.thesttammanynews.com/articles/2009/10/26/news/doc4ae1b724be03e750019321.txt
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