Our Differently-Abled Government
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The Consumer Products Safety Commission, I found myself thinking last week, is about as useful as a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest.
This thought occurred to me in the context of the Chinese drywall problem. This situation has left thousands of homeowners struggling to deal with the corrosive effect of defective drywall in their houses; the drywall releases fumes that blacken house wiring and damage air conditioning coils, along with other deleterious effects.
The CPSC has been studying this problem, in its own way; so have other scientists from the public and private sectors. Last weekend, investigator Tom Gauthier, with the Florida consulting firm Environ International, told a gathering at a University of Florida conference in Tampa that his team has traced the problem to the presence of elemental sulfur in the Chinese gypsum board panels. Gypsum, of course, is a sulfur compound: calcium sulfate. But when there's free sulfur in the board, says Gauthier, the sulfur reacts with carbon monoxide in the ambient air, creating carbonyl sulfate. This compound then reacts further with air and moisture to create hydrogen sulfide and carbon disulfide — gases which can attack copper. The Environ team was able to accelerate the production of the corrosive gases just by placing the drywall in a chamber with elevated levels of carbon monoxide — indicating that the availability of ambient CO is the limiting factor in the initial reaction.
Interesting. Interesting, too, that last week the CPSC, after months of study, told reporters that it could not even confirm that the drywall has a damaging effect on copper at all. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune's headline: "Federal scientists trail others on drywall" (by Aaron Kessler). Writes the Herald-Tribune: "In what struck many as surprising, federal investigators were not yet even able to state there was an association between the tainted drywall and the corrosion of copper wires, pipes, air conditioning coils and other metal components. Florida, along with a host of private consultants, has long since determined that there is a strong association between the drywall and corrosion." In fact, the Tampa conference, the paper pointed out, was actually titled "Technical Symposium on Corrosive Imported Drywall."
The CPSC, in this drama, reminds me of the carpenter I used to work with who would joke, "We may do a crappy job, but at least we're slow." In fact, now that I think about it, my comment above on the CPSC is a slur on one-legged men. I understand that quite a few U.S. service members who have lost limbs during operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have been fitted with advanced, high-tech prosthetic devices; and I believe that most, if not all, of these veterans would actually be valuable team members in any competition to apply blunt force to the gluteus maximus. I must therefore retract my earlier statement and revise it: The Consumer Products Safety Commission, it seems, is actually less useful than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest.
No link between the drywall and the corrosion? Come on. The effect has been observed in multiple tests in different industrial laboratories. But never mind that — I've talked to builders and remodelers who have put Knauf Tianjin drywall in a Mason jar with a shiny, fresh piece of copper pipe and watched the pipe turn black in a couple of weeks. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. As the philosopher Thoreau put it, some circumstantial evidence is very convincing — such as when you find a trout in the milk. This drywall attacks copper. Deal with it.
But on the other hand, it's not perfectly clear to me that the CPSC even has an important role in this whole affair. Drywall may have been bought and installed by some do-it-yourself homeowners, but for the most part it's not really a consumer product in this story. It's really an industrial input. Professional builders are supposed to know the difference between quality materials and garbage; sometimes we may get it wrong, but when we get it wrong, that's on us — at least to begin with. Lennar Homes, for one, is acting like a grown-up in this thing: They're replacing the drywall in the houses they built. They're going after everyone else in the supply chain, and they're looking to their liability insurance carrier to step up also; but Lennar is making it right — on Lennar's dime, for now.
And if we learned one thing from Hurricane Katrina, it's that you can't always count on the government to solve your problems. This drywall situation is making that truth evident again. We shouldn't be too surprised that the private sector is out ahead of the bureaucracy on this problem.
Environ International has been working for Lennar since the problem first became apparent, more than a year ago; if anyone knows about this problem, it's going to be Environ, not a government agency.
At the same time, though — bureaucrats should earn their salaries. In these days of stimulus, I suppose it's a good thing generally that the government is paying these people and getting some cash into the economy; and I definitely am in favor of scientists having productive work to do. And they don't necessarily have to outperform private industry. But still, it's reasonable to expect that in this particular butt-kicking contest, our government won't somehow manage to come in dead last. And hey, this thing is just getting started. There's still time.