Not far from Santa Catalina Island, in an ocean shared by divers and
fishermen, kelp forests and whales, David Valentine decoded unusual
signals underwater that gave him chills.

The UC Santa Barbara scientist was supposed to be studying methane seeps
that day, but with a deep-sea robot on loan and a few hours to spare, now
was the chance to confirm an environmental abuse that others in the past
could not. He was chasing a hunch, and sure enough, initial sonar scans
pinged back a pattern of dots that popped up on the map like a trail of
breadcrumbs.

The robot made its way 3,000 feet down to the bottom, beaming bright
lights and a camera as it slowly skimmed the seafloor. At this depth and
darkness, the uncharted topography felt as eerie as driving through a vast
desert at night.

And that�s when the barrels came into view.

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Barrels filled with toxic chemicals banned decades ago.

Leaking.

And littered across the ocean floor.

�Holy crap. This is real,� Valentine said. �This stuff really is down
there.

�It has been sitting here this whole time, right off our shore.�

Tales of this buried secret bubbling under the sea had haunted Valentine
for years: a largely unknown chapter in the most infamous case of
environmental destruction off the coast of Los Angeles � one lasting
decades, costing tens of millions of dollars, frustrating generations of
scientists. The fouling of the ocean was so reckless, some said, it seemed
unimaginable.

As many as half a million of these barrels could still be underwater right
now, according to interviews and a Times review of historical records,
manifests and undigitized research. From 1947 to 1982, the nation�s
largest manufacturer of DDT � a pesticide so powerful that it poisoned
birds and fish � was based in Los Angeles.

An epic Superfund battle later exposed the company�s disposal of toxic
waste through sewage pipes that poured into the ocean � but all the DDT
that was barged out to sea drew comparatively little attention.

Shipping logs show that every month in the years after World War II,
thousands of barrels of acid sludge laced with this synthetic chemical
were boated out to a site near Catalina and dumped into the deep ocean �
so vast that, according to common wisdom at the time, it would dilute even
the most dangerous poisons.

Regulators reported in the 1980s that the men in charge of getting rid of
the DDT waste sometimes took shortcuts and just dumped it closer to shore.
And when the barrels were too buoyant to sink on their own, one report
said, the crews simply punctured them.

The ocean buried the evidence for generations, but modern technology can
take scientists to new depths. In 2011 and 2013, Valentine and his
research team were able to identify about 60 barrels and collect a few
samples during brief forays at the end of other research missions.

One sediment sample showed DDT concentrations 40 times greater than the
highest contamination recorded at the Superfund site � a federally
designated area of hazardous waste that officials had contained to
shallower waters near Palos Verdes.

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The world today wrestles with microplastics, bisphenol A (BPA), per- and
polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and other toxics so unnatural they don�t
seem to ever go away. But DDT � the all-but-indestructible compound
dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, which first stunned and jolted the public
into environmental action � persists as an unsolved and largely forgotten
problem.

Signs warning of tainted fish to this day still cover local piers. Recent
studies show our immune systems may be compromised. A new generation of
women � exposed to DDT from their mothers, who were exposed by their
mothers � grapples with the still-mysterious risks of breast cancer.

The contamination in sea lions and dolphins continues to stump scientists,
and the near extinction of falcons and bald eagles shows how poisoning one
corner of the world can ripple across the whole ecosystem.

Decades of bureaucracy and competing environmental issues have diverted
the public�s attention. Valentine hoped digging up physical evidence from
the seafloor would get more people to care, but calls and emails to
numerous officials since his discovery have gone nowhere.

Rallying for the deep ocean is not easy, Valentine acknowledged, even
though we rely on the health of these waters far more than we know: �The
fact that there could be half a million barrels down there � we owe it to
ourselves to figure out what happened, what�s actually down there and how
much it�s all spreading.�

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David Valentine, a professor of geochemistry and microbiology at UC Santa
Barbara, had wondered for years whether the DDT waste barrels actually
existed 3,000 feet under the sea. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Once hailed as a major scientific achievement, DDT combated both malaria
and typhus during World War II. It was so potent that a single application
could protect a soldier for months. The U.S. Army�s chief of preventive
medicine, Brig. Gen. James Simmons, famously praised the chemical as �the
war�s greatest contribution to the future health of the world.�

Manufacturers rushed to supply the postwar demand � including Montrose
Chemical Corp. of California, which opened its plant near Torrance in
1947. The chemical industry was celebrated at the time for boosting the
nation into greater prosperity and preventing crop failures across the
globe. The United States used as much as 80 million pounds of DDT in one
year.

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DDT was once considered a wonder pesticide, combatting malaria and
preventing crop failures across the world. Top, a truck sprays DDT in 1945
to eliminate mosquitoes on Jones Beach on Long Island. Bottom, a plane
dusts DDT powder on a flock of sheep in Medford, Ore., in 1948. (Keystone-
France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images; Associated Press)

But there were two edges to this sword. A top U.S. Department of
Agriculture scientist had urged the military not to allow DDT insecticides
for commercial use without further research, worried about �the effect
they may have on soils and on the whole balance of nature.�

Even Swiss chemist Paul Hermann M�ller, who won a Nobel Prize in 1948 for
discovering DDT as a pesticide, cautioned that he himself did not fully
understand how the chemical interacted with the living world. Decades of
painstaking study still lay ahead for biologists, he said.

Rachel Carson, a marine biologist, heeded these words in 1962 and ignited
a movement against what she called �the reckless and irresponsible
poisoning of the world that man shares with all other creatures.�

Her revolutionary book �Silent Spring� evoked the sudden silence of
songbirds missing in the skies � alerting unknowing people to the dangers
of long-term exposure, even in tiny doses, to a chemical that they could
not physically avoid.

DDT is so stable it can take generations to break down. It doesn�t really
dissolve in water but stores easily in fat. Compounding these problems is
what scientists today call �biomagnification�: the toxin accumulating in
the tissues of animals in greater and greater concentrations as it moves
up the food chain.

Consider phytoplankton, the microscopic algae that are the base for almost
all food webs in the ocean.

DDT-contaminated phytoplankton get eaten by zooplankton, which fish and
whales consume by the thousands.

In 1969, shipments of jack mackerel from Southern California were recalled
because DDT levels were as high as 10 parts per million, or ppm � double
what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration considered safe for consumption
at that time.

Tumors started appearing on bottom-feeding fish like white croaker.

In that same year, California brown pelicans, which eat the fish, laid
eggs on Anacapa Island with chemicals broken down from DDT averaging 1,200
ppm.

Scientists discovered that the chemicals led to eggshells so thin that the
chicks would die. Bald eagles had also vanished from the Channel Islands,
along with peregrine falcons and the brown pelicans.

Similarly, sea lions with more than 1,000 ppm in their blubber were giving
birth to pups prematurely. Bottlenose dolphins had concentrations as high
as 2,000 ppm.

Montrose executives aggressively defended DDT through the 1960s as the
public reckoned with these alarming new concerns about food chains and
poisoned ecosystems.

They said in letters and editorials that DDT played a vital role in
society when properly used and was not a serious threat to human health.
They accused environmentalists of scare tactics and misleading information
and touted the company�s reputation of making the best DDT in the world �
a technical grade sold to other firms that would then dilute it into
specific insecticides.

The company was supplying governments from Brazil to India, they said, and
even the World Health Organization. International malaria eradication
programs turned to Montrose for supplies.

But after years of intense inquiries, government officials said they were
convinced that the chemical posed unacceptable risks to the environment
and potential harm to human health. In 1972, the U.S. finally banned the
use of DDT.

Demand was still strong in other countries, however, so the chemical plant
in Los Angeles kept churning out more. Montrose managed to operate for
another 10 years before the factory, looming over Normandie Avenue near
Del Amo Boulevard, finally went dark.

In the early 1980s, a young scientist at the California Regional Water
Quality Control Board in Los Angeles heard whispers that Montrose once
dumped barrels of toxic waste directly into the ocean. People at the time
were hyper-focused on the contamination problems posed by poorly treated
sewage, but Allan Chartrand was curious about the deep-sea dumping and
started poking around.

He called Montrose, and to his surprise, the staff pulled out all their
files. He and a team of regulatory scientists combed through volumes of
shipping logs, which showed that more than 2,000 barrels of DDT-laced
sludge were dumped each month. They did the math: Between 1947 and 1961,
as much as 767 tons of DDT could have gone into the ocean.

�We found actual photos of the workers at 2 in the morning dumping � not
only dumping barrels off of the barges in the middle of the Santa Monica
Basin,� he said, �but before they would dump the barrels, they would take
a big ax or hatchet to them, and cut them open on purpose so they would
sink.�

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A 1958 shipping log shows that 2,310 barrels of �acid sludge� from
Montrose Chemical Corporation were dumped in the ocean in the month of
January.

On a recent morning, Chartrand rummaged through stacks of yellowing papers
and reports detailing everything he had discovered so many decades ago.
Now a seasoned eco-toxicologist in Seattle, he never understood why all
this information wound up gathering dust � undigitized and largely
forgotten.

He pulled out faded reports that his team had published from 1985 to 1989,
summarizing what they had found at Montrose and in the water quality
control board�s own records. �This makes my heart sing,� he said, as he
reread conclusions that still resonate today.

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Allan Chartrand flips through old copies of his studies from the 1980s.
(Rosanna Xia / Los Angeles Times)

Chartrand said he was astonished to learn this kind of activity was
allowed. Federal ocean dumping laws dated back to 1886, but the rules were
focused on clearing the way for ship navigation. It wasn�t until the
Marine Protection, Research and Sanctuaries Act of 1972, also known as the
Ocean Dumping Act, that environmental impacts were considered.

Dumping industrial chemicals near Catalina was an accepted practice for
decades.

Landfills could hold only so much, and people were concerned about burning
toxics into the air � but the Pacific Ocean seemed a good alternative.
Explosives, oil refinery waste, trash and rotting meats all went into the
ocean, along with beryllium, various acid sludges, even cyanide.

Dilution is the solution to pollution, the saying used to go, but at what
cost? The ocean covers more than 70% of the planet, but it can absorb only
so much. What we eat, what we breathe is ultimately dictated by what we do
to the sea.

�It�s just sad, sad, sad,� Chartrand said. �When stuff�s being dumped
offshore like that, it�s in the dead of night, nobody�s seeing it. It�s
out of sight, out of mind.�

For years, a company called California Salvage docked at the Port of Los
Angeles, loaded up Montrose�s DDT waste and hauled everything out to sea.
Workers were instructed to dump in a designated spot, dubbed Dumpsite No.
1, that was about 10 nautical miles northwest of Catalina.

But compliance inspections were infrequent, and crews sometimes took
shortcuts. Chartrand discovered notes from California Salvage indicating
they had decided to dump elsewhere because Dumpsite No. 1 was in line of a
naval weapons firing range.

The report concluded that these companies likely dumped in closer, much
shallower waters.

�Our report caught them red-handed,� Chartrand said. �Here I was this
young guy � newly married, just had my first kid, got my new job at the
water quality control board � heard about this dumping, went down to
Montrose � and it very quickly got so much bigger than me.�

Each container was individually broken before disposal overboard. Drums
containing chemicals were emptied and allowed to sink after holes were
placed in the top, bottom and sides.
� Chartrand et al, March 1985

In 1990, a few years after Chartrand compiled his reports, the
Environmental Protection Agency teamed up with the state and launched a
court battle against Montrose and a number of other companies under the
Superfund law. Environmental groups expected the lawsuit � the largest in
U.S. history alleging natural resource damages from chemical dumping � to
be a landmark case in resolving coastal pollution issues.

Chartrand and dozens of others were pulled in to testify. Science was
disputed in court, evidence debated, expertise challenged. In numerous
depositions, former factory workers were grilled on how they operated.

Bernard Bratter, a Montrose plant superintendent, described how they would
call California Salvage to dump its acid waste in bulk: �The trucks would
come in, we�d load the trucks, they would then haul them down to the
harbor where they had their barges, and the truck would unload into the
barge, and when there was enough liquid in the barge, they�d haul the
barge out to the specified area in the ocean and release the acid.�

Montrose officials, who had filed counterclaims, asked the court to
exclude the evidence presented on ocean dumping � arguing that such
dumping wasn�t relevant.

They said the government�s natural resources damage claim was based solely
on the release of DDT through the sewer system to the Palos Verdes shelf,
and that attorneys could not prove that Montrose�s disposal of DDT-
contaminated waste into the deep ocean actually hurt various bird species.

They also questioned Chartrand�s calculations of how much DDT went into
the ocean and made the point that there was nothing secret or illegal
about the dumping at the time. The government, they said, allowed this to
happen.

In an interoffice correspondence in 1985, Samuel Rotrosen, Montrose�s
president at the time, wrote that �it is true that from 1947, when the
plant started up, until sometime in the 1950s we disposed of our waste
sulfuric acid at sea through California Salvage Company who barged it out
to state-approved dumping areas.

�We stopped this disposal after we installed our acid-recovery plant, at
which time we sold the acid to fertilizer makers,� he said. �Because our
acid contained traces of DDT (50-250 ppm) � the fertilizer producers would
no longer take it, and so we disposed of it at landfills.�

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Three decades after regulatory scientists found evidence of men taking an
ax to these waste barrels before dumping them overboard, an underwater
robot came across barrels on the seafloor with puncture marks. (David
Valentine / ROV Jason)

As the court battle waged on, a handful of curious scientists kept trying
to solve the DDT questions at the bottom of the ocean.

Chartrand did not have a deep-sea robot, but he figured out a way to
collect sediment samples and clumps of tar by dragging a large otter trawl
net along the seafloor. He also took samples of rattails, kelp bass and
other fish from different depths of the ocean.

He called Robert Risebrough, a legend among DDT scientists whose
testimonies in the 1960s and early 1970s helped Congress understand why
the chemical should be banned. Risebrough, a UC Santa Cruz research
ecologist at the time, ran the samples and authored a sweeping study. He
confirmed the existence of considerable concentrations of DDT chemicals in
both the sediments and the �tar cakes� by the dumpsites.

It was unclear how much the DDT could move through the water at such
depths, where there is little oxygen, he said, but the dumping was close
enough to the Channel Islands that the upwelling of deeper water common in
this area could stir up what enters the food chain.

And if the barrels were indeed punctured, he added, some of the sludge
could have leaked out on its way down to the seafloor.

He had a strong suspicion that the disappearance of bald eagles from
Catalina was connected to the dumping operations, but he didn�t have the
data to confirm it. DDT contamination was also significantly higher in
birds that fed on fish, compared with birds that ate mostly rodents and
prey on land � another clue that the DDT from the ocean dumping was
harming wildlife.

He called for more studies to connect the dots, but Chartrand had run out
of funding. Chartrand held on to what he could � even the remaining
samples that neither he nor Risebrough could bear to throw away. Some of
that deep sea sediment has yet to be tested.

�They�re in a deep freeze now, but because it�s DDT, even though it�s been
30, 40 years, they�re still valid,� Chartrand said. �If we could get the
funding, those are still worth running.�

M. Indira Venkatesan, a geochemist at UCLA who studied how chemicals moved
through the sea, had taken one of these samples in the early 1990s and run
her own analyses. She, too, concluded there must be a DDT source in the
ocean much larger than just what had come out of the sewage closer to
shore.

She collected additional sediment cores from the seafloor by a manual
pulley that her technicians and graduate students spent hours pulling up.
Her team distinguished the DDT �fingerprint� for Montrose�s ocean-dumped
waste and discussed the upward and downward diffusion of DDT in the
sediments.

�They were supposed to take it out to sea. I think beyond the Continental
Shelf. But there was a common joke among people that they only took it as
far as they needed to, just out of sight, and started dumping right
there.�
� Deposition of Ferdinand Suhrer, Montrose employee, July 30, 1996

�It gets resuspended and remobilized. That�s why you see it all over the
basin,� she said. �I knew, I just knew, this DDT source was significant,
just from the chemical analysis, but we couldn�t show the extent of the
dumping, nor the number of barrels.�

Back in court, the arguments were focusing on the more tangible: the
hundreds of tons of DDT and PCBs, another toxic chemical, that had been
released two miles off the coast of Palos Verdes where the sewage emptied
into the ocean. Many saw the need to make this public health problem �
much closer to shore, with visible harm to humans and the ecosystem � a
top priority.

The site � spread across more than 17 square miles � was declared a
Superfund cleanup in 1996. About 200 feet deep, it was considered one of
the most complicated hazard sites in the United States � at least three
times deeper than similar Superfund sites in Boston and New York harbors.

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The Palos Verdes coast has been contaminated with DDT for decades. The
attempted cleanup has become one of the most complicated Superfund
projects in the United States. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

By late 2000, the parties decided to settle. They negotiated a consent
decree midway through trial � no sides admitting fault, with an agreement
that more than $140 million would be paid by Montrose, several other
companies that owned or operated a share of the plant, and local
governments led by the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts.

The settlement � one of the largest in the nation for an environmental
damage claim � would pay for cleanup, habitat restoration and education
programs for people at risk of eating contaminated fish.

�This Decree was negotiated ... in good faith at arm�s length to avoid the
continuation of expensive and protracted litigation and is a fair and
equitable settlement of claims which were vigorously contested,� according
to the decree, which mentioned that the damage claim includes �any ocean
dumpsites used for disposing of wastes from the Montrose Plant Property.�

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From 1947 to 1982, the nation�s largest manufacturer of DDT operated in
Los Angeles on Normandie Avenue near Del Amo Boulevard. The property is
considered one of the most hazardous sites in the United States. (Allen J.
Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Attorneys representing Montrose, when contacted by The Times, declined to
comment on the new underwater data and noted that the ocean claims related
to the DDT operation were resolved 20 years ago. Litigation continues to
this day over other impacts from the former plant. In August, a $56.6-
million settlement was finally reached over groundwater contamination.

Back at UCLA, on a recent morning in the geology building, Venkatesan
thought ruefully back to those DDT years. KCBS had run a local news series
on the barrels, and The Times followed the story for a brief period.

The information caught the attention of Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa
Monica), the 1960s activist turned lawmaker who married Jane Fonda and was
remembered as �the radical inside the system.� For a few years, he pushed
for more information about the barrels and an action plan, but so many
unchecked environmental problems demanded attention back then.

Even Venkatesan got pulled away. As public concerns shifted from water to
air pollution, her research focus changed to aerosols.

She had tried for a while longer to get the word out � giving public
lectures in Santa Monica bookstores and telling whoever would listen that
the deep ocean also needed healing.

�I didn�t know what to do with this data; I felt bad,� she said. �As
scientists, we thought we could leave it to the politicians and the
government to do their job�. But if the government is not proactive, then
people don�t care. If people don�t care, then the government doesn�t do
anything.�

Now that she�s retired, her filing cabinets � filled with her work since
she started in 1975 � have been moved into a basement at UCLA. She
recently reviewed the data that the UC Santa Barbara researchers had
uncovered with deep-sea robots, which validated Chartrand�s estimates, as
well as her own.

She held out her hands and said she was trembling with excitement, knowing
that people might care about this issue again.

�Disposing any waste, where you don�t see and forget about it, does not
solve the problem,� she said. �The problem eventually comes back to haunt
us.�

One afternoon in Santa Barbara, hunched over a computer humming with data,
Valentine and Veronika Kivenson, a PhD student in marine science, scrolled
through the eerie images they had gathered underwater.

They leaned in to examine an icicle-like anomaly growing off one of the
barrels � a �toxicle,� they called it � and wondered about the gas that
bubbled out when the robot snapped one off. To have gas supersaturated in
and around these barrels so deep underwater, where the pressure was 90
times greater than above ground, was unsettling. They couldn�t help but
feel like they were poking at a giant Coke can ready to explode.

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About 60 barrels were visually identified by Jason, a remotely operated
robot that also collected samples of nearby sediment with large tubes,
top. One spot had a DDT concentration 40 times higher than the highest
level of surface contamination recorded at the Palos Verdes Superfund
site. (David Valentine / ROV Jason)

One thing was clear, Kivenson said: This stuff is spreading. She had tried
to collect sediment many meters from the barrels as a baseline to compare
the samples collected right next to the source. But the baseline turned
out to also have similarly high concentrations of DDT � most of them
higher than the permissible threshold established by the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration.

�These barrels do seem to be leaking over time,� she said. �This toxic
waste is just kind of bubbling down there, seeping, oozing, I don�t know
what word I want to use. ... It�s not a contained environment.�

So much of this data, collected in 2011 and then again in 2013, came down
to timing and good luck: The underwater robots had been on loan for a
different project, but that research cruise was ahead of schedule, so they
had a window of extra time to explore.

A scientist involved in the discovery of the Titanic happened to be on
board, so he helped them program the robots on where to go and how to
search for the barrels. A marine geochemistry lab at Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution ran the samples, and Kivenson, whose graduate
fellowship and tuition were the only funding for this research, analyzed
them for her PhD.

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Scientists aboard the research vessel Atlantis guide Sentry, an autonomous
underwater vehicle, down into the water to scope out the seafloor. (David
Valentine / UC Santa Barbara)
She tracked down the patent for the DDT acid waste that supposedly went
into the barrels. She combed through EBay for out-of-print research books
on ocean dumping and flipped through rolls of microfilm in the archive
rooms of court buildings and government agencies.

She validated Venkatesan�s conclusion that the DDT near the barrels did
not have the same characteristics as the Superfund site � ruling out the
possibility that this was just DDT from Palos Verdes that somehow traveled
farther into the ocean and settled onto the deep seafloor. One key
difference was that the barrel samples contained no PCBs, which are
abundant in the contamination near the sewage outfall.

Each barrel seemed to contain acid waste with about 0.5% to 2% technical-
grade DDT � which, at half a million barrels, would amount to a total of
384 to 1,535 tons of DDT on the seafloor. The distribution was patchy; one
hot spot had a concentration of DDT that was 40 times higher than the
highest level of surface sediment contamination recorded at the Superfund
site.

All told, she concluded that the total amount of DDT from the dumping
seemed comparable to the estimated 870 to 1,450 tons that had been
released through the sewer.

But in the end, these are still extrapolations � we don�t know how much is
actually down there, said Kivenson, who published these findings last year
in the journal Environmental Science & Technology and is now a
postdoctoral fellow at Oregon State University. Logical next steps would
be to somehow map and identify just how many barrels there are, determine
any hot spots, and study how much the chemical is leaking and spreading
and accumulating.

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When Sentry pinged back anomalies, a larger remotely operated robot named
Jason, above, was sent down to take photos and gather samples. (David
Valentine / UC Santa Barbara)

Valentine tried calling those with the power to do something about these
barrels: the EPA, which has been in charge of cleaning up the Superfund
site. But the EPA, it turns out, hasn�t even figured out what to do with
the DDT problem that got all the attention and millions of settlement
dollars. After more than 20 years of meetings and high-level studies, the
site off the Palos Verdes shore has become its own controversial saga.

A pilot experiment more than a decade ago to bury the DDT under a thick
cap of clean sand showed mixed results. Then sampling in 2009 suggested
that most of the DDT had mysteriously vanished � prompting a burst of
headlines and more internal paralysis. The longtime project manager
unexpectedly retired, and many of the scientists who had dedicated decades
of their careers to the chemical have also either retired or moved on.

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More than a decade ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
experimented with burying the DDT on the Palos Verdes shelf under a thick
cap of clean sand. (Ken Lubas / Los Angeles Times)

Many, when reached, said they had not been involved with the site for a
number of years.

�I feel like something�s happened at the site; it just sort of died. It�s
been very weird,� said Robert Eganhouse, a research chemist at the U.S.
Geological Survey who had been studying the Superfund site and the
breakdown rates of DDT since the 1970s.

His last meaningful exchange with the EPA was in late 2016, when he
submitted an immense amount of data and a final synthesis report for the
site � a research endeavor that took more than eight years and cost
millions of dollars. To this day, Eganhouse, who recently retired, is not
quite sure what the EPA did with this information.

Judy Huang, the Superfund�s project manager for the past decade, when
reached by The Times, directed questions to regional headquarters.

In an email, an EPA spokeswoman said the agency had suspended capping
efforts and collected new data that showed twice as much DDT as the 2009
results. The EPA is now reassessing its approach: �We are updating our
evaluation of the mechanisms of how the DDTs and PCBs in the sediment
impact human health and the environment in this complex system.�

In the meantime, projects to restore local kelp forests, wetlands,
seabirds and underwater habitats have been supported over the years with
the settlement money, as well as education outreach that helped prevent
anglers and vulnerable communities from eating poisoned fish.

Fish remain contaminated, but the concentrations seem to be slowly going
down, according to findings from the EPA�s most recent five-year review of
the site, released last fall. The bald eagles and peregrine falcons are
coming back after years of human assistance, and nature seems to be
healing itself over time.

After all these years of costly stops and stalls, some think a so-called
monitored natural recovery approach might just be the best solution. The
EPA plans to start a new feasibility study that aims to lead to a final
cleanup strategy. That study is not expected to be published for another
four years.

Mark Gold, who had championed the DDT problem as a marine scientist since
the 1990s, could barely find the words to describe how he felt about the
attempted cleanup of the Palos Verdes shelf.

�To have the EPA say, 25 years later, that maybe the best thing to do is
to just let nature take its course is, frankly, nothing short of
nauseating,� he said.

When asked about the barrels, he was so shocked he had to pause and grab a
calculator to process the amount of DDT that could be in the deep ocean.
At an absolute minimum, he said, there needs to be further investigation
into how much is actually down there and how much this dumping has harmed
the ecosystem.

Gold, who is now Gov. Gavin Newsom�s deputy secretary for coast and ocean
policy, said he had heard stories of illegal dumping back when he was
helping state and federal officials build the case against Montrose. But
there was no firsthand evidence in the 1990s, he said, nor a sense of
whether it was five barrels, 10 or 20.

�Nobody in their worst nightmares,� he said, �ever thought there would be
half a million barrels of DDT waste dumped into the ocean off of L.A.
County�s coast.�

https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-coast-ddt-dumping-
ground/assets/image/garibaldi-2000.6edf6962.jpg

A garibaldi, the state fish, swims through a kelp forest near Catalina
Island. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

For scientists today, DDT poses a new generation of complications.
Dilution, it seems, just means the problem re-accumulates elsewhere. In
the environmental health laboratory at San Diego State�s School of Public
Health, Eunha Hoh recently discovered the chemical had wound its way into
dolphins in unexpected ways.

Marine mammals, like humans, nurse their young and live long lives. Slow
to evolve, their long-term health is a window into the lasting impacts of
chronic exposure and accumulation � and how these chemicals get passed
onto babies. As some of the largest predators of the sea, they�re also an
important indicator of the ocean�s overall health.

So when Hoh sampled the blubber of eight adult dolphins that had lived
deeper off the coast of Southern California, she was surprised to find
significant amounts of 45 DDT-related compounds. Every dolphin she tested
had washed up dead � and had accumulated much more of these chemicals than
dolphins tested in Brazil and elsewhere around the world.

�DDT contamination � is it really going down in Southern California? Can
we really say that, or are we missing something,� said Hoh, who also
serves on the California Ocean Protection Council�s science advisory team.
�Sure it was banned decades ago, it might be manageable globally, but
Southern California? We�re different. Our ocean is so much more polluted
with DDT. We cannot just say, �That�s done; we can move on to other
things.��

Hoh�s expertise is in discovering new chemicals, but she remains mystified
by how DDT keeps reappearing in new and unexpected ways. Where, she often
wonders, is all this DDT coming from?

When she first heard about the barrels scattered across the seafloor, it
was as if someone finally handed her missing pieces to a puzzle that had
never quite added up.

The questions came tumbling out. If that much more DDT is out there but
forgotten, and no one knows to study it, she said, how will we ever
understand the true legacy of this chemical?

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ground/assets/image/fish-kelp-catalina-1200.497d9da7.jpg

The ocean�s health, scientists say, is inseparable from our health and the
health of the planet. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Current monitoring shows that the local ecosystem, on the whole, is
stable. But what�s unclear are these long-term unknowns, said Keith
Maruya, who co-authored the dolphin study and retired last year as the
Southern California Coastal Water Research Project�s head of chemistry.

�It�s not like something�s going off the cliff. But what we don�t know is
whether these things are going to have a longer-term, more subtle effect �
are some populations really, really slowly going to be declining?� he
said. �We don�t know the answer. Moreover, we don�t really have the tools
yet to answer that question fully.�

He jolted up in his chair when the discovery of the barrels came up in a
recent conversation.

�Wow. Wait, how many did they find? I need to write this down.�

He jotted a few numbers, then silently compared this with the known
quantity of DDT dumped at the Superfund site.

�If nobody accounted for this second source � if you�ve got twice the
amount,� he said, thinking aloud. �It�s such a staggering number, but what
does this mean? � The bottom line is always going to be: So what? We have
a chemical out there, so what?�

At the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in a developmental biology and
environmental toxicology lab overlooking the sea, Amro Hamdoun has been
pondering this question for much of his life.

He�s found through molecular studies that �persistent organic pollutants,�
like flame retardants and DDT, can block a key protein from eliminating
toxins from the human body � a clue, perhaps, into why they bioaccumulate.
Even in small amounts, these contaminants could interfere with the human
body�s natural ability to defend itself.

Hamdoun teaches �Silent Spring� and DDT to his students as an example of
how the world used to be � but can�t help but wonder how much the jobs and
science of the future will be dealing with these messes of the past.

�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 runoff � and that our health is
going to be separable from that,� he said. �But what we�re learning more
and more is that our health and the ocean�s health are pretty
inseparable.�

At what point, he asked, does it become our prerogative, as people who
live in a shared society, to decide what it is that we want to put in our
environment � and our bodies?

He leaned forward in his chair, hands clasped, head bowed, like Valentine
and Chartrand and so many who came before.

�These chemicals are still out there, and we haven�t figured out what to
do,� he said. �They are an issue, and we still don�t have a plan.�

https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-coast-ddt-dumping-ground/