WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE

摘要

In 1996, A homeowner living in Wilmington, N.C., made a call to Daniel Bryson, an attorney based in nearby Raleigh. Bryson specializes in construction defects involving mass torts and class action lawsuits, but he had never heard a story like this one. "The homeowner was putting a new shutter on the garage. And he missed the shutter, and the nail went straight through the wall," Bryson says. The man then broke open a piece of the exterior cladding and uncovered a horrific scene: the wood underneath had deteriorated from pervasive rot. "He thought he had stucco, but what he saw inside the wall he called Styrofoam," Bryson says. "The building inspector had no idea what the product was. I had never seen anything like it." The house was actually wrapped in a proprietary lightweight synthetic cladding known as an Exterior Insulation and Finishing System (EIFS)-a multilayered wall system with thermal insulation built right in.