Huge DDT Dumping Ground Found Near Catalina

November 3, 2020 at 12:15 PM PST

Speaker 1: 00:00 Speaker 2: 00:41 Speaker 1: 00:45 Speaker 2: 00:55 Speaker 1: 01:33 Speaker 2: 01:48 Speaker 1: 02:28 Speaker 2: 02:32 Speaker 1: 03:35 Speaker 2: 03:52 Speaker 1: 04:15 Speaker 2: 04:25 Speaker 1: 05:26 Speaker 2: 05:41 Speaker 1: 06:38 Speaker 2: 06:41 Speaker 1: 07:03 Speaker 2: 07:19 Speaker 1: 08:05 Speaker 2: 08:10 Speaker 1: 08:50 Speaker 2: 08:56 Speaker 1: 09:31 Speaker 2: 09:41 Speaker 1: 10:33 Speaker 2: 10:41 Speaker 1: 11:02 Speaker 2: 11:15 Speaker 1: 12:26 Speaker 2: 12:35 Speaker 1: 13:13 Speaker 2: 13:29 Speaker 1: 14:33 Speaker 2: 14:38 Speaker 1: 14:41 Mankind has done some terrible things to the environment. And only recently are some of those shocking acts coming to light. An article by LA times, reporter Rosanna Shaw pulls together evidence of a massive dumpsite of half a million barrels of toxic DDT sludge in the deep ocean. Not so far from our San Diego coastline, close to Catalina Island. Research scientists have photographed barrels leaking on the ocean floor that were dumped years ago and found evidence of toxic contamination. Way beyond that previously recorded in a nearby Superfund site. We're joined now by Rosanna Shaw. Who's the environment reporter for the Los Angeles times. Rosanna. Welcome to midday. Hi, Alison. So glad we're talking about this. No, I imagine that there may be many younger listeners who haven't heard about DDT and its history in this country, fill us in briefly what it is and what it was used for. Yeah, we, we worry a lot today about BPA and P phos, these toxic forever chemicals, but DDT was the original problem. Chemical that is so unnatural that it never really goes away. It was once considered a wonder. Pesticide used a lot during world war II. And it was so strong that a single application could protect a soldier for months. And after the war, it got commercialized for farming and other uses. And many today don't know this, but the largest DDT manufacturer was based in Los Angeles for decades. It was used pretty universally, even in places like farms and home gardens until the 1962 publication of the book silent spring by Rachel Carson. What did she expose? Tell us about the impact of her book. Yeah. Silent spring is like the Rosetta stone for so much of the environmental movement. You know, Rachel Carson, she was a Marine biologist really explained in such simple, powerful words, how chemicals like DDT poisons and ripples across an entire ecosystem, you know, before silent spring concepts that we're pretty familiar with today, like food chains and ecosystems and how the ocean and rivers and our health are all interconnected. These concepts for mindblowing to folks and silent spring really was revolutionary in the sixties and shocked the public into action. So now what kind of damage does DDT do to the ecosystem? Yeah, imagine a tiny, tiny fish or, you know, plankton contaminated with DDT and then a bigger fish eats dozens of those fish. And that fish gets eaten by a bigger fish with, she gets eaten by top of the food chain, animals like dolphins and Eagles and pelicans. And by the time you're at the top of the food chain, the accumulation of DDT is so significant in your bodies. And DDT takes a really long time to break down like generations. And what makes it pretty unique in a scary way is that the chemical can get passed on to babies. So with the bald Eagles and Falcons and Brown pelicans, the chemical basically led to really thin eggshells and the chicks wouldn't survive. And all of a sudden there were no more birds on our islands, you know, and, you know, as for humans, I think that's a question I hear a lot from readers. We're still figuring out the long-term impacts of having DDT, even in small doses in our bodies for so long and then passing it on to our children. So it was being used from the forties right up until 1972 when the United States banned it. What happened after that? I mean, Montrose chemical in Los Angeles was one of the world's largest producers of this chemical. Right. Did, did they stop producing it after 1972? Yeah. So Congress ultimately ban the use of DDT in the U S in 1972, but other countries were still using it, especially for malaria eradication programs. So the company mantra is chemical kept operating and making DDT in Los Angeles to supply the international demand. And they didn't close down the plant until 1982. There was another, there was a Superfund site of palace Virtus that people knew about. How did that come about? And, and what was done about that? The controversy with Montrose really came bubbled to the surface when the public, um, discovered years after it shut down that the company was dumping its waste had been dumping its waste through the sewage, which goes straight out into the ocean. So DDT remnants from this waste was making its way out into our waters. And so there was a super fun battle that picked up in the 1990s that was really focused on the sewage dumping. You know, this one particular outfall dumped out about two miles off the palace Verde shore and all the contamination spread across roughly a 17 square mile area that the EPA declared an official hazardous waste cleanup site. And the EPA ultimately reached a settlement with the chemical company, a number of others for $140 million that would go toward clean up and restoration. This, this court battle was massive in the nineties and it's still to this day, one of the largest environmental damage settlements in the country. So millions were spent on the palace Virtus dumping site, but then tell us about David Valentine in your story. You talk about how he stumbled on this other whole problem with DDT further out. Yeah, so interesting. So for decades, we were told and focused on the waste dumping through the sewage and how the palace Verdes shore is like the largest underwater Superfund site in the country. But David Valentine, a researcher at Santa Barbara had heard whispers basically that this chemical company had not only dumped through the sewage, but also in the 1950s taken barrels of their DDT waste out near Catalina and dumped them directly into the ocean. And so in 2011, he had the super awesome deep sea robot on loan for a different research project. But that research mission was way ahead of schedule. So he had some extra time to poke around and when he dropped the robot 3000 feet underwater, he came across these barrels and a lot of them had like punctures in them and they were leaking and it really was an Oh my God moment. So you're saying they were punctured. Why were they punctured? There were some reports that I found in the seventies and eighties that said that basically because the barrels, if they didn't sink and they were like floating still because of navigation concerns, they would just take an ax to these barrels and puncture them so that they would sink all the way to the sea floor. This was all stuff that people did back then. It's, it's so disturbing to hear what happened back then. So when Valentine saw these barrels, um, did he get the impression that the stuff was still inside? How far has the stuff spread? Yeah. And so, I mean, because it wasn't an intentionally focused research survey, it was more just, you know, skimming the sea floor with the time that they had with this robot. They were able to identify about 60 barrels and take a couple samples of the sediment. And, you know, they're trying to figure out whether or not the DDT was, you know, contained too close to the barrel versus whether it was spreading and based on what they were able to gather in the time that they had all the information and data does show that the it's it's leaking, it's not contained, but how much leaking upward up the water column versus staying kind of horizontally down 3000 feet deep under water is still a question that needs to be answered. I mean, what exactly is inside these barrels? Why were they being dumped? Yeah. Doing a bit more research. Um, Veronica, Kevin Anson, one of Dave Valentine's students who studied this for her entire PhD, she had tracked down the patent for what supposedly went into these barrels. And it's basically like an acid sludge, like waste residue from the DDT making process. And her estimates came out to be, you know, each barrel probably contained about 0.5 to 2% DDT. There could be as many as half a million barrels still down there. And at 2% DDT per barrel, the math came out to be like 1500 tons, total of DDT underwater still right now from these barrels. So does the us environmental protection agency have anything to say about this? Yeah. So the EPA is in charge of cleaning up the palace or the Superfund site. You know, they've been in charge of this since the mid nineties, early two thousands. And after more than two decades, they're still trying to figure out what to do with that site, which is so much less deep than the 3000 feet deep dumpsite that Dave Valentine and his team just discovered, you know, whether the EPA is going to do anything with this new info is still to be determined. You know, I, when I asked the EPA about the discovery of the barrels, you know, what do you think, what should we do? What do you have to say about this? The agency ultimately declined to comment for the article. You interviewed a Marine scientists, um, Mark gold, who is now governor Newsome's deputy secretary for coastal and ocean policy. What was his reaction to the story? Yeah, Mark gold. He was like the champion of this issue all the way back in the early days when he was the first scientist to he'll today. And he's been frustrated with the lack of meaningful progress in the cleanup of the Superfund site. And when I talked to him recently about the barrels, he was, I mean, he was shocked. He said he was shocked. And when he was, you know, he said, when he was helping the EPA and the state build this case against mantras back in the 1990s, he said they had all heard rumors about, you know, this other dump site, this other way of disposing of the waste, the deep sea dumping, but there was no hard evidence and no sense of how much was getting dumped and, you know, definitely not half a million barrels. So our, our conversation recently was, you know, pretty remarkable when we were talking about this new information. Have you seen any indication that the problems getting any attention from state or federal agencies? I've definitely been hearing a lot of chatter at the state. I know they're hearing a lot from the public, so I think we're all kind of waiting right now for the dust to settle from the election, but I definitely will be following up with folks and pushing for more information. So stay tuned for updates. We definitely all have a lot more questions to ask. Well, one of the questions I guess, is what could be done about it. I mean, what has been done at the Superfund site and what could be done, uh, to mitigate the damage that was caused by the barrels that have now been uncovered? That's a great question. I mean, I try to ask that every scientist I talked to and I mean the Superfund site is only 200 only, quote-unquote 200 feet deep and that's proving to be super complicated to figure out what to do with like the hotspots. And, you know, they tried capping it with a fresh layer of sand and they've tried a number of things. And with the barrels at 3000 feet deep, I mean, I think a lot of folks have when they read this article, they say, we need to get, we need to get them out of the ocean, but it's 3000 feet deep. Imagine bringing up a leaking barrel that is like a shaken up Coke can, you know, up 3000 feet with all the pressure differences. It's just, it's not, that is not a feasible option, but you know, whether or not we can get a more comprehensive survey of like how bad the problem is actually is, you know, how many barrels there actually are? What, what, how much it's leaking and which direction it's leaking and whether or not there are any hotspots. I mean, I think those are all, you know, next step questions that could be studied in a more comprehensive way before we, and then from there we can really figure out what, um, remediation solutions there might be for the barrels down there. And by the way, does the company Montrose that produced the DDT and dumped the barrels? Does that company still exist? Could they be held liable? So they are still in ongoing litigation with the EPA. This legal battle has been going on since 1990. And, uh, they just resolved groundwater contamination issues related to the actual plant site near Korones, uh, back in August. And yeah, they're still in trial over a lot of other elements of the legacy of this DDT operation. You know, when I spoke to the lawyers and ask them for any kind of comment, you know, they basically told me that the ocean damage claims were resolved back in 2000. So just looking ahead here for a moment, I know that apparently some of the species that have been affected the bald Eagles that disappeared have started to return, but, but what is the long-term threat of leaving all of that stuff down there? I mean, that's a question that we're all grappling with, right? Like this is a chemical that takes generations to break down. We don't really know its longterm impacts because we're still living it. We're still in the process of finding out what it means to have a synthetic chemical as bio accumulative of DDT, continuing to reappear in all these forms and fashions and different Marine mammals and birds and our own bodies. And, you know, ultimately we, the public deserve to know what's out in our oceans and this history. And I think the more we're equipped with clear information and sense of the scope of the problem, we can actually study it in a meaningful way. And it's just one of the things that I continue to think about is how for so many years scientists were studying the long, the longer term impacts of the legacy of DDT didn't even have a clear sense of how much DDT might be in the ocean, because for so long, we didn't even know about these barrels off of Catalina. Well, Rosanna, thank you for all the work that you've put into uncovering this story. I really appreciate the questions. Thanks so much. Alison We've been speaking with Rosanna Shaw, who's the environment reporter for the Los Angeles times.

By KPBS Public Media

Waste from a chemical company near Torrance, California, and dumped into the ocean near Palos Verdes created what became a DDT-contaminated superfund site in 1997. In the last decade, a marine scientist photographed evidence of what may be half-a-million barrels of DDT waste dumped into deeper waters closer to Catalina.