Wow, too bad it's not WA, but right next door in ID. When I get a chance (ha!) I'll dig through the ID state administrative code to see if I can find similar references there. The other part (and I didn't realize this) was that it was actually sold by the bank as a reposessed home. Now I remember when I was buying my last 911, I stumbled across a deal that looked too good to be true, and it was a repo-911. Knowing it's past, I looked closer than I maybe would have looked at another car, and I found some things that made me not buy that car, not at any price. My curiosity re: the litigation route is whether some portion of the fault lies with my sister, in that they didn't exercise due diligence in checking thoroughly for meth before going in.
I talked to my Mom re: this issue; sister is on the road with no cell phone, and I won't see her until Sunday. Mom strongly disliked the idea of litigation -- I'll keep pushing on her, because it really seems like someone should have had the due diligence to figure this out before they sold it. I absolutely agree that HO insurance should cover at least a segment of the costs, but that route has been tried and the answer is, in fact, "NO."
My suspicion is that _someone_ should have checked this before selling to first-time home-buyers, newliweds, etc., but my sneaking concern is that maybe it should have been the buyer, not the seller. OTOH, banks have a lot of money, so maybe deep pockets wouldn't balk too heavily at shelling out the $10K to fix the house, as compared with whatever the cost of bad publicity could end up being.