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Tainted Drywall

Tainted Drywall

How Companies Kept Silent While Homeowners Suffered

Five Things You Can Do With Our Interactive Feature on Tainted Drywall

by Jeff Larson
ProPublica, Dec. 17, 2010, 9:53 a.m.

On Wednesday, we launched an interactive database of more than 6,900 homes whose owners say they have tainted drywall. It’s a fairly complex application with lots of features. Here’s a guide to how you can use the application to dive into the data.

1. Find information about an individual address

If you click on an address on the map, you can see the data we collected for that particular address. In most cases that data includes the homebuilder, contractor, importer, distributor and/or the manufacturer responsible for the drywall used in the home. It also includes the raw address listing as we found it in both the lawsuit and county data. Check out 1660 Rennaisance Commons in Palm Beach County, Florida »

2. View an address on street view

By dragging the streetview pegman () to a particular address street you should see a panorama of the home that is listed as having tainted drywall.

3. List CPSC reports in a particular month

Each bar in the timeline is clickable and will replace the table below the timeline with the CPSC narrative reports for that particular month. These reports range form boilerplate—“Chinese drywall used in the home”—to detailed accounts. For example:
“A 30 year old male experiencing chronic headache, itchy, watery eyes and insomnia from chinese drywall in the home. Concerned about daughter not yet 1. Had to replace evaporator and condenser coils of a/c, 3 microwave ovens and copper in fixtures blackened.”

4. Find Tainted Drywall installations near your home

If you enter your address in the search box on the homepage you’ll be taken to the associated county page, with a marker showing your address.

Correction: The "Tainted Drywall" news application originally included lists of contractors, manufacturers, distributors, importers and builders involved in lawsuits over tainted drywall. A software bug caused those lists to overstate the number of addresses associated with each company. The erroneous lists, and references to them, have been removed.

1 comments

john womeldorf

Dec. 22, 2010, 6:38 a.m.

Jeff,
As an FYI there are numerous homes in Virginia with Chinese Drywall that are not shown on your map.

This article is part of an ongoing investigation:
Tainted Drywall

Tainted Drywall: How Companies Kept Silent While Homeowners Suffered

Foul air from Chinese-made drywall has created a nightmare for thousands of homeowners.

The Story So Far

ProPublica and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune began examining in May 2010 what was—or wasn’t—being done to help people whose homes had been built with contaminated drywall. The problematic drywall, much of it imported from China, emitted foul odors and frequently caused mysterious failures of new appliances and electronics. Worse yet, some residents complained of serious respiratory problems, bloody noses, and migraines.
More »

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