The damage being blamed on defective drywall is ugly: corroded copper coil, electrical wires eaten away and a noxious odor fouling the air. Health complaints range from itchy eyes to headaches and bloody noses to breathing problems.
It's believed that "bad" drywall produces corrosive sulfur gasses. The reason remains unclear
In its pure form gypsum emits no gas or odor. Bad drywall, however, is darker.
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"The interior of drywall consists of calcium sulfate, otherwise known as gypsum or plaster of paris. There are many common anaerobic bacteria that utilize sulfate, in the absence of air and presence of water, as their oxygen source, converting the sulfate to sulfide.
The interior of drywall is a good anaerobic medium, and if such bacteria are present and the humidity is adequate, the calcium sulphate is converted to calcium sulfide, which reacts with water to produce the gas hydrogen sulfide. This gas corrodes many metals and is also highly poisonous."
We went thru this before with drywall releasing sulfur dioxide in landfills. Anaerobic bacteria release the gas in moist, oxygen free environments. This has nothing to do with how drywall reacts in a fire.
ETA: As it turns out, the drywall in question is contaminated with sulfur and other substances not normally found in drywall.
[/FONT] An estimated 60,000 American homes,
built within the last five years, are rotting from the inside out.
Normally drywall is made purely from the stone-like mineral gypsum, and emits no gas or odor. But health officials now suspect at least some of the Chinese product was contaminated with dangerous chemicals,
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4895804n
Tests on two small samples of Chinese drywall performed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) detected three suspicious compounds in the samples. These included
sulfur and two organic compounds associated with acrylic paint. Similar compounds were not found in four samples of American-made drywall, the EPA said.
The Chinese drywall samples used for the EPA tests were obtained from a Florida home. The domestic samples come from stores in New Jersey.
According to the EPA, its analysis of the material found sulfur at 83 parts per millions (ppm) and 119 ppm in the Chinese drywall samples. Sulfur was not detected in the four US-manufactured drywall samples.
http://www.chinese-drywall-answers....tain-sulfur-acrylic-paint-compounds-epa-says/
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