JUNE 2002
EDITED BY JON VARA
Whirlpool Bacteria
Complaints Spark Lawsuits
Lawyers in Waco, Texas, have launched class-action lawsuits
against Jacuzzi, Kohler, and Lasco. Waco attorney John
Malesovas says his office has uncovered email complaints to tub
makers from consumers about “schmutz,”
“grunge,” and “gunk” spewing from the
jets when the unit is filled and turned on. Malesovas says his
clients have not received the bathing experience they paid for
and should get their money back.
When the tubs are emptied, the suit claims, undrained water in
the hidden plumbing supports the growth of
“biofilms,” or organized communities of bacteria
that survive cleaning efforts and quickly recontaminate the
bath water when the tub is next used.
Company customer service responses to complaints were
misleading, asserts Malesovas. He says Jacuzzi sent many
homeowners the same canned e-mail, saying, “Sounds like
you have an algae problem,” and advising the homeowner to
flush the pipes out with a commercial algaecide.
But Malesovas refers to a report by Dr. Rita Moyes, a
microbiologist at Texas A&M University who tested water
samples from 50 whirlpool baths. Instead of algae, Moyes found
millions of Legionella, pseudomonas, staphylococcus, and
human intestinal bacteria — all potentially infectious
organisms.
Compared to tap water from the same houses, Moyes reported,
whirlpool tub water samples had bacteria counts averaging 5,000
times higher, with some samples containing tens of millions of
bacteria in a half ounce of water.
Jacuzzi responds. Reached by
phone, Jacuzzi president Phil Weeks told JLC, “The
overall number of complaints about debris in a bathtub relative
to the total number that we have sold is miniscule over the
years. And the purging instructions that have been used for
years have solved many, many of the problems.”
Persistent debris problems are few, says Weeks, and a lot of
those are the result of a problem upstream: “Any bathtub
is at the end point of the water system. Mineral content, or
other things upstream, can affect all the water appliances in a
home.”
Kohler officials directed JLC to the company’s
website at www.us.kohler.com, where a statement quotes
microbiologist Dr. Charles Gerba as saying, “There is no
documented evidence of the company’s whirlpool bathtubs
having posed a health hazard to consumers.” Kohler
advises consumers to purge their tub units at least twice a
month with two teaspoons of low-foaming dishwasher detergent
and four ounces of household bleach.
A competitor weighs in.
Whirlpool makers face a related attack from Dallas-based
Sanijet, Inc., a new competitor whose jetted-tub design
doesn’t rely on hidden plumbing.
Sanijet models have detachable and washable impellers that
mount on the inside walls of the tub units and are driven by
individual motors. On the company’s website at
www.sanijet.com, Sanijet highlights the Texas lawsuits and
claims that only “pipeless” Sanijet tubs allow
complete disinfection.
But Sanijet has met resistance in trying to move its tubs
through traditional K&B showroom channels; showrooms have
been reluctant to bring in a new product whose literature
paints other units on the floor as virtual slime factories.
Sanijet has pulled its models out of showrooms nationwide and
is pitching the tubs direct to homeowners through its website
instead.
Jacuzzi’s Phil Weeks comments, “Sanijet is selling
a concept that moves water, but they’re not really
selling a whirlpool bath. Their system doesn’t induce air
into the action, and really the hydrotherapy benefits of a
whirlpool bath are derived by mixing water and air together.
They’ve tried to sell cleanliness as their main issue. I
think the marketplace will determine whether that’s
valid.”
Unhealthful bacteria. So
what about the health claims? Under the wrong conditions, there
is no doubt that the bacteria Moyes identified can cause
illness and even death. Medical journal articles have blamed
bacteria in hot tubs for infections ranging from a common rash
called “pseudomonas folliculitis” to dangerous
pneumonias, Pontiac fever, and a bacterial infection dubbed
“hot tub lung,” as well as several fatal outbreaks
of legionnaires’ disease.
But unlike spa-type hot tubs, bathroom whirlpool tubs are
drained after each use. Do the germs that can thrive in poorly
maintained hot tubs pose a risk in bathroom whirlpools? The
question is controversial.
Bad bugs in bunches.
Scientists at Montana State University’s Center for
Biofilm Engineering (CBE) in Bozeman have found that once
bacteria like Legionella or pseudomonas attach to a
plumbing surface, they protect themselves with a matrix of
secreted polysaccharide slime, forming tiny channels to bring
in food and expel wastes and toxins. When tub jets are turned
on, individual bacteria and bits of biofilm are shed into the
water.
At a public health conference in Ontario, Canada, CBE director
William Costerton, Ph.D., said whirlpool bathers might inhale
water droplets contaminated with bits of bacterial biofilm that
CBE researchers have observed “actually bouncing in a
haze over the whirlpool.”
And the organized films are tougher and more dangerous than
free-swimming, or “planktonic,” forms of the same
bacteria, says Costerton. “[Biofilm fragments containing]
as few as 100 cells of pseudomonas or Legionella can
establish a pulmonary infection in animals,” he testified
in one Texas case. “Biofilms can only be killed by
concentrations of biocides 1,000 to 1,500 times higher than
those necessary to kill planktonic cells.... Two teaspoons of
dishwasher detergent and four ounces of household bleach
circulated for 10 to 15 minutes would have very little
effect.”
“If you look at Costerton and Moyes,” counters
Jacuzzi president Weeks, “they have formed an opinion,
but neither one of these people have had their work accepted by
any scientific body that we know of.”
“We’ve employed a number of experts who have
studied the pseudomonas and Legionella infections that
have occurred in spa units,” says Weeks, “and their
professional opinion is that they don’t see how this
could be a problem in a whirlpool bathtub unless there’s
some other contamination upstream.”
Cleaning solutions. And
it’s true that not all whirlpool owners are complaining.
On an Internet chat board where Sanijet V.P. Philip Klement
joined a homeowner discussion about whirlpools, some consumers
did express dissatisfaction; but others reported using their
units regularly without noticing any slime problems.
The difference may depend on whether the tubs are kept clean
from day one. “The need for elevated levels of the
disinfectant is to kill an established biofilm,” CBE
engineer Darla Goeres told JLC. If you start with a
clean tub, she says, “you may be able to maintain
sanitation with much lower levels.”
Goeres says that Malesovas paid for a CBE study to identify
biofilms in whirlpool tubs. “But then no one has
supported us to do the study in drain-and-fill whirlpool
bathtubs to test different disinfection techniques.
That’s research that needs to get done, and I am
optimistic that you could come up with an effective cleaning
protocol, especially with a brand-new tub. But the exact
amounts that would be required, we don’t yet
know.”
“Jacuzzi has solved most of the problems that have
occurred,” maintains Phil Weeks. “There have been
some debris cases up until recently that we have been unable to
solve,” he acknowledged, “but in the last 18 months
or so, we found a product that was being used to clean milk
pipes in the dairy industry, and that has solved all the cases
that we’ve ever used it on. We now provide that at no
charge on an as-needed basis when other things don’t
solve the problem. We want people to be happy with the
product.”
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“Critical
Habitat” Under Review
One of the most controversial provisions of the federal
Endangered Species Act has to do with the designation
“critical habitat,” which permits the National
Marine Fisheries Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service to
restrict land-use practices that might harm an endangered or
threatened species within the specific habitat area. For years,
builders have complained that this unfairly restricts
development, and several recent events suggest that the Bush
administration may be listening.
The National Marine Fisheries Service recently announced its
plans to redraw the critical habitat designation for 19 salmon
and steelhead populations in Washington, Oregon, California,
and Idaho. The decision came in response to a lawsuit filed by
the NAHB and 16 other groups, including developers and local
governments, which contended that the original critical habitat
designation was “excessive, unduly vague, not justified
as essential” and “not based upon a required
analysis of economic impacts.”
The agreement on the salmon lawsuit builds on a federal court
ruling issued in May of 2001. In the earlier case, which pitted
a group of New Mexico cattle ranchers against the Fish and
Wildlife Service, a Denver court ruled that economic impact
must be considered when an area is designated as critical
habitat. The Fish and Wildlife Service has announced that it
will also review, and possibly set aside, critical habitat
designations for a number of other endangered species,
including the Newcomb’s snail, found in Hawaii; the Gila
trout of New Mexico and Arizona; and the Northern Great Plains
piping plover.
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Euro Studs Gaining Ground in
Eastern U.S.
Canada shipped more than 18 billion board feet of lumber to
the U.S. in 2001, making it by far our biggest supplier of
imported framing lumber. (Total U.S. lumber production was just
under 35 billion bf during the same year.) But other
lumber-producing countries are making their presence felt in
the U.S. as well, including Germany, Sweden, Austria, and
several other European nations.
According to the forest industry newsletter
Widman’sMarket Barometer, European
producers will be stepping up their exports to the U.S. by more
than 50% this year, to a total of about 810 million board feet.
That still represents only about 2% of total U.S. softwood
consumption, but along the Eastern seaboard — the zone of
entry for most European lumber — imports from across the
Atlantic could fill 8% of the total market need.
Shawn Church, of the lumber market report RandomLengths, notes that most of the imported European lumber
consists of 2x4s and 2x6s, and that the overall quality is very
good. “There’s usually no wane,” he says.
“It’s mostly Norway spruce stamped number 2,
although it’s usually more like a number 2 and
better.”
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Concrete Blasts
Off
When we colonize space, will our interplanetary habitats
have concrete basements? Don’t laugh yet. Students at the
University of Alabama in Huntsville have launched the first
rocket made from concrete. The prototype craft isn’t
quite ready for interstellar missions — it’s about
two feet high, and its two-minute maiden voyage reached a
height of about 500 feet — but the school appears to be
serious about concrete as a spaceflight material.
“There’s a really good chance these materials will
replace the aerospace composites that are out there now,”
said UAH’s Dr. John Gilbert, one of the faculty advisers
on the project. “I think we can make structures out of
concrete that are lighter and more flexible than structures
made of graphite epoxy composites.”
This is no ordinary concrete. Made from a recipe that includes
Portland cement, glass microbeads (microscopic hollow spheres),
latex, acrylic fortifier, and water, and reinforced with
graphite fiber, it’s a flexible, high-strength material
light enough to float on water. Students developed the formula
as part of the school’s participation in the annual
ASCE/MBE National Concrete Canoe Competition.
Alabama is a perennial finalist in the canoe events, and its
latest model, Survivor, is designed to be flexible. In
fact, it’s one of the first “STARS”
(Strategically Tuned Absolutely Resonant Structures). The idea
is to capture the energy of wave resonance and use it to make
the canoe go faster, although it makes the ride a little
strange (like a cross between a bicycle and a camel, say the
paddlers).
Details of the concrete canoe project and an mpeg video of the
concrete rocket launch can be found online at
www.uah.edu/student_life/
organizations/ASCE/Competition/2001.htm.
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Big Builders Getting Bigger
A recent study of the U.S. housing industry conducted by
Andersen Corporate Finance suggests that the big fish will get
much bigger in the coming decade by gobbling up large and
middle-sized competitors. According to
The Impending
Consolidation of the Homebuilding Industry, that trend is
already well underway. In 1997, for example, the top 100
builders in the nation were responsible for about 24% of all
new homes. Three years later, that figure had climbed to 37%,
and the report’s authors expect it to reach 50% by 2004.
By 2011, the study predicts, the top 20 builders alone could
produce more than 75% of all U.S. homes, with the single
largest of them churning out a full 20% of the total.
Does this mean that small builders are on the road to
extinction? Probably not. If the benefits that such highflying
mergers and acquisitions have to offer — including lower
capital costs, access to large expanses of land, and national
brand-name recognition — were all that mattered, most
small builders would have starved years ago. Flexible,
quality-conscious builders will continue to thrive by zeroing
in on the profitable niche markets that mega builders
aren’t equipped to deal with.
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Single-Story
Turnaround
American houses have been getting bigger for years.
According to the NAHB, the average size of a new home increased
from a mere 983 square feet to 2,265 square feet between 1950
and 2000. As houses increased in size, they also got taller: In
1970, single-story houses accounted for nearly three-fourths of
all new homes built. That figure had fallen to 60% by 1980, and
a decade later it stood at just 46%.
But after decades of decline, the latest NAHB statistics show
that single-story models staged a modest comeback in 2000,
climbing to 47% of all new single-family homes built that year.
The likeliest explanation for the new trend, as for so many
trends in the housing industry, probably has to do with the
changing needs of baby boomers. Many boomers are now seeing
their children leave home and perhaps are thinking it
won’t be long before they themselves lose interest in
climbing stairs.
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Business Tune-Up
It’s Okay to Stay Small
by Melanie Hodgdon
How big should your company be? Only you can answer that
question, but I’d like to caution you about blindly
accepting the all-too-common attitude that growth is an end in
itself.
Some builders, admittedly, stay small for the wrong reasons.
Some can’t let go of authority. Others fail to grow
because they’re too disorganized to run multiple jobs,
while still others lack the management skills to build an
effective workforce. But there are also lots of contractors who
choose to remain small because they know that they’re
already working at their most productive and profitable
size.
Remember: It’s not how many dollars you take in that
matters, but how many you get to keep. If you’re
comfortable staying small, that’s great. Maybe you know
your own strengths and desires better than the competition
across town with a cast of thousands knows theirs. I have a
number of clients who have elected to keep their businesses
small, to wear a toolbelt, and to pick their clients carefully.
These folks are booked two and three years in advance, their
clients don’t even ask for estimates, and their
net is in excess of 20%. They still enjoy making sawdust and
producing something beautiful and durable. Why in the world
should they change?
Yes, the day will come when climbing around on a roof is no
longer the thrill it used to be, but in the interim
they’re punching up their retirement fund and doing what
keeps them interested in going to work every morning.
In short, make sure your size is the result of a conscious
choice and not the default result of personal or business
shortcomings that could be overcome. Decide what kind of work
you understand, like to do, and can do profitably. Then go do
it and ignore the rest.
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Offcuts
Destructive Formosan termites continue to be a serious
pest in much of the Southeast, as demonstrated by the
success of a simple specimen-collection technique used by
researchers at the Louisiana State University Forest Products
Laboratory. “I fill a plastic milk crate with scraps of
wood and leave it in an infested area for several weeks,”
says Dr. Ramsay Smith. “At the end of that time, it might
contain 50,000 termites.”
After a 22-year legal battle, a dispute between a builder
and a homeowner in New Zealand has been resolved by the
nation’s highest court. A panel of judges ruled that
homeowner Bruce Adkin must pay builder Keith Brown an overdue
$15,000 for the modest two-story house that Brown built for him
in 1980. Adkin had alleged that the house contained defects
that made it unsafe, although an independent panel of building
experts found that the defects could have been remedied
inexpensively and that Brown was not given a chance to complete
the job. In addition to the original $15,000, Adkin was ordered
to pay about $34,000 in interest and legal costs.
A new refrigerated oven may be just the thing for fans of
high-tech kitchen hardware. The Whirlpool Polara range,
which will go on sale in July, features a programmable oven
that will keep a prepared meal cold until the timer tells it to
shift into cooking mode, allowing the busy homeowner to walk in
the door to a hot meal. If you’re late, it shifts into a
warming mode; and if you’re really late, it automatically
produces leftovers by switching back to cooling.
Canadian lumber producers hope to increase lumber sales to
China, according to the Toronto Globe and Mail. A
trade organization, the Council of Forest Industries, recently
persuaded China’s central government to include a chapter
on North American wood-platform framing in the newest version
of a national building code, which is expected to be approved
this summer.
A New Jersey appeals court has struck down a state
regulation designed to combat sprawl. The regulation,
implemented last year, required builders to undergo extensive
environmental reviews before undertaking projects that involved
building seven or more houses in areas without public sewer
systems. The court ruled that the regulation had been
improperly adopted because the state had failed to allow
advance public comment.
Everyone knows that smoking is bad for your health, but it
can also be hazardous to your siding. This picture was
taken beneath the exhaust outlet of a heat-recovery ventilator
(HRV) serving a three-year-old home inhabited by heavy smokers.
In addition to being a graphic reminder of the dangers of
smoking, it demonstrates that HRVs remove significant amounts
of pollutants from indoor air and underscores the need for
regular inspection and maintenance of the HRVs themselves:
Although we can’t see the interior of the ventilation
unit, the condition of the wall suggests that it’s
probably due for a good cleaning.
The California legislature is considering a bill that would
require property and liability insurance policies to cover
losses caused by mold. A spokesperson for the California
insurance industry denounced the bill, contending that it would
disrupt the insurance market in the state and lead to much
higher insurance rates.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater is no longer in
danger of falling, with the completion of a months-long
project to repair its cracked and sagging cantilevered
terraces. The cracked slabs have been strengthened with the
addition of internal post-tensioned steel cables, and the
temporary shoring that supported them for the past five years
has been removed. Still, the repaired structure retains a
distinct sag. “Those deflections will always be
there,” said a spokesperson for the Western Pennsylvania
Conservancy, which owns the historic dwelling. “You
don’t notice it as much from the interior of the house as
you do from looking at the exterior.”
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