The Rocky Mountain Collegian

Issue date: 4/13/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Bill Haber - The Associated Press St. Bernard Parish Fire Chief Thomas Stone removes an electrical outlet as Marco Kaltofen, a professional engineer and environmental scientist, and president of Boston Chemical Data Corp., a Natick, Mass.-based environmental investigation firm, looks on during an inspect of Chief Stone's bathroom for sulfur-emitting Chinese drywall in in Chalmette, Friday, April 3, 2009. (AP Photo/Bill Haber)

CHALMETTE, La. (AP) - Thomas Stone and his wife rebuilt after their home was flooded by six feet of water during Hurricane Katrina, never dreaming they would face the agony of tearing it apart all over again.

They tapped Lauren Stone's 401(k) retirement savings and saved $1,000 by installing Chinese-made drywall throughout their two-story home. Now the Stones are among hundreds of Katrina victims facing another, this time unnatural, disaster.

Sulfur-emitting wallboard from China is wreaking havoc in homes, charring electrical wires, eating away at jewelry, silverware and other valuables, and possibly even sickening families.

"The bathroom upstairs has a corroded shower-head, the door hinges are rusting out," said 50-year-old Thomas Stone, the longtime fire chief of St. Bernard Parish, outside New Orleans. And then there's the stench, like rotten eggs, that seems to get worse with the heat and humidity.

"It makes me wish there would be another flood to wash it out," said his wife Lauren, 49.

Chinese manufacturers flooded the U.S. market with more than 500 million pounds of drywall around the same time Katrina was flooding New Orleans, an Associated Press review of shipping records has found.

The boom in imported China-made building materials peaked in 2006, driven by domestic shortages created by the nationwide construction boom, as well as a series of Gulf Coast hurricanes.

That year, enough wallboard was imported from China to build some 34,000 homes of roughly 2,000 square feet each, according to the AP's analysis and estimates supplied by the nationwide drywall supplier United States Gypsum. But experts and advocates say many homes may have been built with a mixture of Chinese and domestic drywall - which could push the number of affected homes to 100,000 or more, by some estimates.

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