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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.�

A garibaldi fish swims through a kelp forest off Catalina Island.
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?

A fish swims through a kelp forest off Catalina Island.
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/

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