Taking the unprecedented step of declaring the ocean off Southern California a Superfund project, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday that it has assumed command of the cleanup of a major DDT deposit that has poisoned marine life for decades.
The EPA will investigate options for reducing the dangers posed by the 100 tons of DDT dumped on the ocean floor off the Palos Verdes Peninsula, and plans to select a short-term solution within a year for the most highly contaminated spots.
The deposit--considered the most problematic and persistent case of ocean pollution in the country--is still harming bald eagles, peregrine falcons, fish, dolphins and other marine life a quarter-century after the pesticide was banned, according to government-hired scientists.
Devising a remedy for the world's largest deposit of DDT, which flowed from the now-defunct Montrose Chemical Corp. plant near Torrance, is considered a huge challenge. It sprawls across 27 square miles of the deep ocean floor.
No ocean areas except contained harbors have ever been declared Superfund sites and made part of the government's program for cleaning up the worst pollution. The long-delayed decision was welcomed by many state and local officials and environmentalists, who say it will hasten the remedy of an ecological problem that has lingered too long.
EPA assistant regional counsel John Lyons said the decision was spurred by the "severity of the conditions out there on the Palos Verdes shelf." EPA documents released Wednesday called the deposit a high risk to marine life and to people who eat fish caught there.
"This is a significant problem offshore, both in terms of the threat to the environment and to public health, so we're turning to the full guns of the Superfund arsenal to address this," Lyons said.
From 1947 to 1971, Montrose Chemical Corp. flushed several million pounds of DDT into the county sewer system that empties off the Palos Verdes Peninsula, according to government records. The widely used pesticide was banned in the United States in 1972 after it accumulated in the food chain, decimating birds worldwide and posing a cancer and reproductive risk to people.
In designing a remedy, EPA officials will focus initially on hot spots with high concentrations of DDT and PCBs in a three-square-mile area off White's Point, under 300 feet of ocean water.
