{"id":8240,"date":"2010-05-03T05:56:37","date_gmt":"2010-05-03T12:56:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gasdetection.com\/?page_id=8240"},"modified":"2021-10-17T09:32:58","modified_gmt":"2021-10-17T16:32:58","slug":"fixing-houses-contaminated-chinese-drywall-report-field","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.gasdetection.com\/interscan-in-the-news\/magazine-articles\/fixing-houses-contaminated-chinese-drywall-report-field\/","title":{"rendered":"Fixing Houses Contaminated With Chinese Drywall: A Report From The Field"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Health<\/a><\/p>\n

May 3, 2010<\/p>\n

Fixing Houses Contaminated With Chinese Drywall: A Report From The Field<\/p>\n\"Working\n

By\u00a0 Michael D. Shaw<\/p>\n

With an estimated 60,000 homes affected, and boasting the warm, humid climate that encourages all the symptoms of tainted gypsum wallboard, Florida is where the action is on the Chinese drywall front. So, that’s where I was last week. I followed a crew headed by construction consultant Michael Foreman, of Foreman and Associates, Inc.<\/p>\n

Although Chinese drywall has been identified throughout the state, no area has been harder hit than the city of Cape Coral, with perhaps 5,000 affected homes. I would spend three days there, but the first stop was a house in Venice, FL\u2014suspected of having, and then proven to have tainted drywall.<\/p>\n

Foreman has developed a non-destructive inspection protocol to determine if a house contains tainted drywall, that he claims has been correct 100 percent of the time. Gases emanating from the tainted drywall will corrode copper components, and the visible damage shows up on air conditioning and refrigerator coils, as well as copper wiring.<\/p>\n

Most affected homes will have some sort of odor, but this can be misleading. For one thing, the human olfactory sense is not linear, and a measured hydrogen sulfide concentration of 30 parts-per-billion does not smell “twice as bad” as a concentration of 15 ppb. For another, at least 18 odorous compounds have been detected in tainted drywall, and even though most of these contain sulfur in some form, one of the main ones\u2014acetic acid\u2014does not.<\/p>\n

Indeed, I was armed with an Interscan hydrogen sulfide analyzer<\/a> and detected the target gas, but noted that the homes I tested did not have the classic “rotten egg” hydrogen sulfide odor. What I smelled was definitely a mixture. As it happens, the closest thing I found to a pure hydrogen sulfide odor derived from sulfide-laden well water, common to many Florida homes. Readings of more than 100 ppb were obtained when sampling air near a running faucet.<\/p>\n

Another factor, of course, is ventilation. In the early days of Chinese drywall home testing, ethically-challenged labs were taking air samples with all the windows and doors opened, and the air conditioning running full blast. Since the tainted drywall exudes its corrosive and odorous compounds continuously but slowly, ventilation will go a long way in lowering the ambient concentrations.<\/p>\n

As we say, the solution to pollution is dilution.<\/p>\n

Once in Cape Coral, Foreman and I met up with a Fox News crew, on site to document how Foreman’s group remediates a house determined to have tainted drywall. At the heart of the remediation is treatment with a proprietary solution containing chlorine dioxide, supplied and applied by AbissoCleanse, Inc.<\/p>\n

First comes the demolition phase, followed by the treatment, which is applied to all remaining surfaces. Next, an independent environmental testing company collects core samples of wood and block from the home to be analyzed for any remaining compounds. Based on these results, reconstruction of the home can begin.<\/p>\n

The demolition process goes like this:<\/p>\n