Sonar images of the seafloor about 3,000 feet down off Southern California showed some 25,000 barrels, scientists announced in 2021. The barrels sat between Catalina Island and Los Angeles, and the researchers said their work indicated the barrels contain DDT.
The story starts with Montrose Chemical Corp., a California DDT maker. The Los Angeles Times reviewed shipping logs from a disposal company that supported Montrose and found that about 2,000 barrels of DDT-laced sludge were potentially dumped each month from 1947 to 1961, per Axios.
Here is the twist. The Environmental Protection Agency’s research found that Montrose did not dump its acid waste in drums. The waste was stored in large tanks, trucked to the Port of Los Angeles, pumped into barges, and dumped, according to the EPA. The agency says “barrels” in the old records was a unit of volume, and the barrels on the seafloor likely contain other chemicals.
The EPA’s April 2021 memo adds that haulers in the 1940s and ’50s reported monthly volumes in barrels, dividing tanker capacity by 48 or 55 gallons, per the agency’s memo. UC Santa Barbara scientist David Valentine put it more simply. “Bulk dumping of DDT acid waste was the norm,” he said, per Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
That does not make the site any less of a puzzle. A 2023 Scripps survey mapped 135 square miles of seafloor and found most of the objects were discarded military munitions and pyrotechnics, with industrial barrels concentrated in two locations, per Scripps. Sediments in the San Pedro Basin had DDT concentrations above those at the Palos Verdes Shelf Superfund site, according to the Scripps site on the dump.
Now Congress is weighing the next step. Sen. Alex Padilla and Rep. Salud Carbajal, both California Democrats, introduced the Ocean Protection and DDT Reduction Act. The Senate version, S. 5563, was introduced Sept. 24, per the Congressional Record. The House version is H.R. 10536, per Carbajal’s office.
The bill would direct the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to monitor waste sites in the San Pedro Basin and study how DDT enters the ocean food web, with $6 million a year for fiscal years 2026 through 2032, per Padilla’s office. NOAA could also award grants to map the spread of contamination. “Our communities deserve to know what’s in the water off of the coast of San Pedro,” Padilla said.
Dumping at sea often has a way of disrupting the undersea equilibrium. In 1972, Florida fishermen sank 2 million old tires off Fort Lauderdale to build a reef, and the tires ended up damaging the real reefs instead.
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