History of DDT ocean dumping off LA coast even worse than expected, EPA finds

After an in-depth historical investigation into the barrels of DDT waste reportedly dumped near Catalina Island decades ago, federal regulators concluded that the toxic pollution in the deep ocean could be far worse — and far more profound — than what scientists expected.

In internal memos recently made public, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials determined that acid waste from the country’s largest manufacturer of DDT — a pesticide so potent it poisons birds and fish — was not contained in hundreds of thousands of sealed barrels.

Most of the waste, according to newly unearthed information, was poured directly into the ocean from huge tankers.

Although ship data listed the number of barrels discarded, regulators say the word “barrel” seemed to refer to a unit of volume rather than a physical barrel. Closer examination of old records revealed that other chemicals — as well as millions of tons of waste from oil drilling — had also been dumped decades ago in more than a dozen areas off the coast of Southern California.

“That’s pretty overwhelming in terms of the volumes and amounts of various contaminants that were released into the ocean,” said John Chesnutt, a Superfund section manager who led the EPA’s engineering team on the investigation. “This also begs the question: So what’s in the barrels? … There’s still so much we don’t know.”

These revelations build on much-needed research into DDT’s toxic and insidious legacy in California. As many as half a million barrels of DDT waste are unaccounted for in the deep ocean, according to old reports and a UC Santa Barbara study that gave the first real look into how the Los Angeles coast became a chemical dump.

Public call for action has grown since the Los Angeles Times reported that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, which was banned in 1972, is still circulating in the marine environment. California sea lions, critically endangered condors and generations of females continue to be affected by this pesticide in mysterious ways. Numerous federal, state, and local agencies have since partnered with scientists and nonprofits to find out what’s happening at 3,000 feet underwater.

A team led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography sprang into action last year and began mapping the landfill with advanced technology. Other expeditions helped pull deep-sea sediment samples, and dozens of researchers have gathered to discuss how to fill the most critical data gaps. Congress has, at the urging of Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. $5.6 million has been set aside to work on the issue. Governor Gavin Newsom, in his final budget, just matched federal funding by another $5.6 million.

The extent of the pollution has turned out to be startling. While trying to figure out how much DDT was being dumped into the deep ocean, regulators discovered that from the 1930s to the early 1970s, 13 other areas off the coast of Southern California were also approved for dumping military explosives, radioactive waste , and various chemical and refinery by-products, including 3 million tons of petroleum waste.

Very little is known about these deep water removals, other than a pixelated map from a 1973 technical report in which each landfill site was marked with a small dot or square.

“The fact that we’re here, over 50 years later, and we don’t even know what’s in the 14 landfills other than a summary of a 1973 report from the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project? That’s just not acceptable, said Mark Gold, who has been tracking the DDT issue as a marine scientist since the 1990s and currently serves as Newsom’s deputy secretary for coastal and ocean policy. “You’re really going to ask, okay, how big is the problem of deep-sea ocean dumping…not just off the coast of California, but across the country?”

Gold noted that there are also more shallow areas off the coast of Palos Verdes and at the mouth of the Dominguez Canal that have been known DDT hotspots for decades. Figuring out how to clean up those contaminated areas in an underwater environment has been its own complicated story.

Evidence also shows that there may be two DDT landfills, named Dumpsite 1 and Dumpsite 2, as the company responsible for the disposal may have decided to dump in a different area than where it should be.

The dumping appears to be spotty: The Scripps Expedition spent two weeks mapping a swath of seafloor larger than the city of San Francisco, but it couldn’t find an outer boundary to Dumpsite 2. Initial sonar studies suggest there may still be thousands of physical vessels underwater filled with who knows what.

As for the mystery of the DDT barrels, regulators combed through old aerial photos of the Montrose Chemical Corp. plant. near Torrance and the berth from which the waste transporters departed. They called on all possible government agencies to dig up their records and considered all the logistics that would have gone into transporting half a million physical barrels at the time.

Finally, they called a retired EPA investigator who had been in charge of the deep-sea DDT dumping. He explained that in the 1940s and 1950s, local government agencies had asked waste carriers to report their amounts of waste using a standard unit of measurement: barrels.

The exact volume remains unclear, but the standard at the time ranged from 42 to 55 gallons per barrel, depending on the industry. It’s also likely that rounding errors were made when the companies turned their huge tanks of waste into barrels, and that more chemicals were dumped than logged.

Regardless of how the waste was dumped into the ocean, sediment samples so far show that there is clearly a lot of DDT present. The big question now is whether the chemicals have been sequestered or embedded in the seafloor well enough to prevent them from being re-mobilized — or whether they’ve been recycled in a way that threatens human health and California’s marine environment.

The EPA has had regular meetings with key state and federal agencies (“the Collaborating Agencies”) and with numerous scientists to determine how to concentrate additional sampling and analysis. In a spirit of transparency and coordination, an online archive repository was recently created to help inform the ongoing investigation as best as possible.

Given the intense interest in the DDT landfill, some hope the groundbreaking research now underway can help regulators address the larger toxic legacy of deep-sea dumping.

“There is no environmental program, especially at the federal level, that is designed to address the challenges, the conditions that these landfills present,” said John Lyons, acting deputy director of the Region 9 Superfund division of the United States. EPA. “What the collaborating agencies are doing is shaping and bending part of our existing program to put together this initial study, in hopes it can inform how future studies of the other sites — in Southern California or in the United States.” nationwide – can be formed and performed.”

Allan Chartrand, an ecotoxicologist who first estimated the magnitude of DDT dumping in the 1980s, said it was heartening to see so many puzzle pieces from the past finally coming together.

“It’s time to act,” said Chartrand, urging everyone working on the problem to gather the additional data needed to take more targeted action. “There are tons (DDT) out there, and we haven’t done anything about it.”

David Valentine, the Santa Barbara scientist at the University of California, whose research team first encountered dozens of mysterious barrels underwater, said the lack of a physical object to look for makes the problem more complicated and even more worrisome. If highly acidic DDT waste wasn’t considered too bad to dump straight into the ocean, he wondered, what could have been worse that had to be put in a real barrel?

“Maybe some of those barrels were the bad batches … but we don’t really know. It could be a lot of other things as well,” said Valentine, who has considered the next steps for research — in the field and in the lab.

He recently convened more than 50 environmental scientists, regulators and nonprofit organizations at a conference to exchange ideas. Oceanographers explained how the DDT waste could move up and down the water column — and perhaps even out of Southern California waters — depending on the currents and ocean physics, as well as particle size and density. Marine chemists discussed how the waste might react differently with the water, depending on its acidity. Ecotoxicologists exchanged notes with human toxicologists, and everyone asked policymakers what kind of science would help their efforts to take action.

Given the latest information from the EPA, they described the material poured into the ocean as likely a hail or haze of DDT-laden particles raining down from the ocean’s surface.

“It’s on the seafloor now, possibly for 60, 70 years,” Valentine said. “What happened to all this material in that time? Has it moved? Is it working its way back into the ecosystem? Those are the things we really need to start answering.”

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