February 4, 2021

When the Los Angeles Times uncovered the devastating revelation that barrels filled with DDT had been dumped and leaking near Catalina Island for over 79 years, the environmental community was shocked. It was not that long ago that the State of California won a seemingly massive victory with a $145M settlement against Montrose Chemical Corp, the culprits behind most of the barrels, for discharging DDT into the ocean via LA County sewers. This settlement was a huge environmental win at the time, leading to collaboration among NGOs, community leaders, and the State to address contamination from the 17 square miles, 200-foot deep Palos Verdes Superfund site.

It took years to negotiate the cleanup requirements for the Superfund site. Yet, two decades later, it turns out that – while settlement monies may have been used for positive restoration and education projects in the area – long-promised cleanup of the DDT Superfund site has not happened…and now many officials are calling for ‘cleanup’ through natural attenuation. According to the EPA, natural attenuation relies on natural processes such as Biodegradation, Sorption, Dilution, Evaporation, or Chemical reactions to decrease concentrations of contaminants in soil and groundwater meaning simply letting the pollution at the Superfund site remain unabated, until it naturally decreases, a process that will take generations.

What’s worse?

In addition to the superfund site, as many as a half-million leaking barrels of DDT – which were not the primary focus of the 2000 settlement-were dumped into the ocean and have remained underwater a mere 10 miles from the site in far deeper waters. Moreover, “[o]ne sediment sample showed DDT concentrations 40 times greater than the highest contamination recorded at the [Palos Verdes] Superfund site.” For generations, the ocean buried this evidence, but federal and state government agencies knew about the barrels and had been put on notice about the potential additional contamination. Many folks investigated these whispers, including a scientist from the LA Regional Water Board, whose findings went largely ignored. These reports collected dust and all that remained were more stories and rumors of these barrels. Excluded from any cleanup or mitigation requirements, the barrels remained underwater, leaking the highly toxic chemical that has contaminated the base of the marine food chain, likely having devastating impacts on local fish populations, marine mammals, and birds that prey on fish. This ultimately threatens our health, especially our vulnerable communities- people who depend on fish and other coastal resources to feed themselves and their families.

While the front-page-worthy egregiousness of DDT’s legacy along our coast is equal parts infuriating and terrifying, we must also understand that the themes of this sad story are still commonplace today. We continue to maintain this ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mindset, treating the ocean as a limitless dumping ground for billions of gallons a year of toxic urban runoff, sewage, and industrial discharges, and plastic pollution. We continue to develop a never-ending array of ‘forever chemicals’ that make their way into our inland and coastal waters, where they have devastating impacts on wildlife and ultimately our own health as they make their way up the food chain. We remain blind to the obvious connection between the health of our oceans and our own future on the planet. As summed up eloquently by Amro Hamdoun from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, “There’s a broader problem of thinking of the ocean as this unlimited garbage dump that’s going to take up our CO₂, take up our mercury, deal with the plastic that we don’t throw away properly, be a dumping ground for pesticides, deal with whatever is in the runoff — and that our health is going to be separable from that. But what we’re learning more and more is that our health and the ocean’s health are pretty inseparable.”

And we are still not doing nearly enough to hold polluters – and the agencies that tolerate their actions – accountable for the harm they do to our environment and resulting impacts on the health of our communities. And even when proactive regulators are willing to hold corporations and other polluters accountable, dischargers can often push delay tactic after delay tactic, waiting for turnover of agency board and staff in hopes that loss of institutional knowledge and/or less stringent replacements will let them off the hook. Given the already limited regulations in place to protect our waterways from pollution, this constant disregard for the few we have is a clear violation of our right to clean water. Enforcing the laws we do have, using them to hold polluters and leaders accountable, and pushing agencies to be stronger is at the core of what LA Waterkeeper does.

Regarding the DDT contamination off our coast, while Montrose is obviously at least partially to blame…so too are the institutions who continue to let this most toxic of chemicals pollute our ocean. Even today, while we lament the legacy of DDT contamination in our ocean, many of our agencies and municipalities push permits with ‘Safe Harbors’ that don’t allow for enforcement (read more on ‘Safe Harbors’ in our blog post on the MS4 permit), rarely undertake enforcement themselves, or are pushing for lengthy delays of long-established and carefully negotiated cleanup plans for our most contaminated waterways (some even arguing cleanup of some waterways may not be possible for up to 600 years!).

LA Waterkeeper, together with our environmental and environmental justice partners, are calling on our federal, state, and local lawmakers and agencies to work together to immediately and transparently put plans together to address the DDT contamination at both sites off our coast (the PV shelf and the newly discovered barrel sites)…plans that do not begin and end with natural attenuation. And, following the saying that ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,’ we ask these same decision-makers to better regulate the toxins that still flow too freely into our waterways and neighborhoods, and demand accountability from those that harm our environment and communities.

And rest assured that LA Waterkeeper – one of the leading enforcement arms of the local environmental community – will be watching and making sure that polluters and agencies are held accountable. Stay tuned for our next blog: What’s Up With Safe Harbors, And What’s Being Done To Make Sure We Have An Enforceable And Strong MS4 Permit?