Seven Hampton Roads homes in first tainted drywall trial

Seven Hampton Roads homes built with tainted Chinese-made drywall will be the focus of the first federal trial involving the building material.

The goal of the first trial, set to go forward in New Orleans on Jan. 25, will be to figure out how much it will cost to fix the homes.

The local homes were built with drywall imported by the now-defunct Norfolk company Venture Supply Inc., which purchased about 150,000 sheets of the wallboard from Taishan Gypsum Co. Ltd., a company controlled by the Chinese government.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, which is handling all federal lawsuits involving the drywall, issued a default judgment in September against Taishan, also known as Shandong Taihe Dongxin Co. Ltd., after the company failed to respond to the suit.

In the next two months, remediation experts for both plaintiffs and defendants will be studying the local homes, which are in Virginia Beach, Williamsburg and Newport News, to determine a protocol and evaluate how much it will cost to remediate homes built with the drywall.

Then U.S. District Judge Eldon E. Fallon will rule on how much Taishan is responsible for paying, a determination that could be used in subsequent trials against other Chinese-drywall manufacturers.