A ticking timebomb has recently been discovered off the coast of California. Yahoo News reported that a number of corroding barrels were located off the coast of Los Angeles near Catalina Island, which had apparently been a secret until recently. That is when marine researchers came across them with an advanced underwater camera, Yahoo said.
It was long believed that the barrels possibly contained remnants of pollution from a former DDT manufacturer in the state. This theory seemed to gain traction when what was described as “startling amounts of DDT” was found near the barrels.
However, that theory was dismissed since federal regulators recently disclosed that the manufacturer had not disposed of the waste in barrels but instead dumped it directly into the ocean, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times, citing internal memos from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Now, however, scientists believe the barrels, in fact may have contained low-level radioactive waste. From the 1940s through the 1960s, it was common practice for hospitals, labs, and other industrial operators “to dispose [of]] barrels of tritium, carbon-14, and other similar waste at sea,” Yahoo said.
“This is a classic situation of bad versus worse. It’s bad we have potential low-level radioactive waste just sitting there on the seafloor. It’s worse that we have DDT compounds spread across a wide area of the seafloor at concerning concentrations,” said David Valentine, who led a research team from UC Santa Barbara that came across the barrels, raising concern about what they might contain. “The question we grapple with now is how bad and how much worse.”
The discovery by Valentine’s researchers was published last week in Environmental Science & Technology and was part of a more wide-ranging, “highly anticipated study” that is looking into how much DDT is located in the area, as well as how it can still be moving under 3,000 feet of water.
In 2020, the LA Times reported that DDT, also known as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, which was banned in 1972, continues to likely have a detrimental effect on the marine ecosystem. Scientists have traced significant amounts of the chemical “up the marine food chain,” with a recent study linking the presence of DDT to “an aggressive cancer in California sea lions.”
Teams of marine scientists and ecotoxicologists are in the process of trying to compile data; however, they have encountered some unexpected roadblocks. One of those was encountered by a research team from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which discovered a cache of discarded military explosives from the World War II area.
In researching through old records, the DEP came across records that showed at least thirteen areas off the California coast that were approved for discarding military explosives, radioactive waste, and a variety of refinery byproducts, including some three million metric tons of petroleum waste.
In a study published last week, Valentine wrote he had discovered swaths of DDT across the seafloor larger than the city of San Francisco. His researchers collected hundreds of sediment samples to map the footprint of the hazardous material dumping, trying to map how the chemical is moving through the water and determining if it has broken down.
While their numerous trips out to sea haven’t led to determining the boundary of the dump site, the team has concluded that much of the DDT remaining in the ocean is still in “its most potent form.”
Carbon dating methods found the DDT dumping peaked in the 1950s when Montrose Chemical Corp. of California was operating in Torrance before formal ocean dumping regulations were implemented.
Jacob Schmidt, a researcher in Valentine’s lab, researched old records and found that California Salvage, the same company that dumped DDT waste off the coast of LA, also dumped low-level radioactive waste while out at sea.
Back in 1959, the now-defunct company obtained permits, as documented in the US Federal Register, to dispose of containerized radioactive waste 150 miles off the coast. Discrepancies arise in the records between the US Atomic Energy Commission and other documents, as the former's notes suggest that the permit was never put into action.
On the contrary, alternative records reveal that the company actively promoted radioactive waste disposal services and accepted waste during the 1960s from a radioisotope facility in Burbank, as well as barrels containing tritium and carbon-14 from a nearby VA hospital.
Researchers also believe that despite the requirement mandating DDT waste be dumped 150 miles offshore, Valentine’s researchers believe that both DDT and radioactive waste were dumped closer to shore.
“There’s quite a bit of a paper trail,” Valentine said. “It’s all circumstantial, but the circumstances seem to point toward this company that would take whatever waste people gave them and barge it offshore–with the other liquid wastes that we know they were dumping at the time.”
Researchers who are not part of the project suggest that certain abundant radioactive isotopes, like tritium, might have undergone decay in the ocean over the last 80 years. Nonetheless, Ken Buessler, a marine radiochemist, recognizes that numerous uncertainties persist regarding the presence of other hazardous materials that might have been disposed of.
The fact remains, however, that up until the 1970s, people routinely dumped radioactive waste in the oceans rather than in landfills, which Buessler noted. He retrieved an old map published by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which showed over 56,000 barrels of radioactive waste was dumped into the Pacific Ocean between 1946 and 1970. Despite public consciousness about dumping radioactive waste into ocean waters, it still occurs, with low-level radioactive waste dumped into the ocean by nuclear power plants, as well as decommissioned plants such as one in Fukushima, Japan.
“The problem with the oceans as a dumping solution is once it’s there, you can’t go back and get it,” said Buessler, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “These 56,00 barrels, for example, we’re never going to get them back.”
Some environmentalists are not concerned about the known waste more so than that which is unknown.
“The more we look, the more we find, and every new bit of information seems to be scarier than the last,” said Mark Gold, an environmental scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who has been researching the effect of DDT for over 30 years.
“This has shown just how egregious and harmful the dumping has been off our nation’s coasts and that we have no idea how big of an issue and how big of a problem this is nationally,” Gold continued.
The discovery of the DDT stores has caught the attention of California lawmakers, including Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) and Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-CA), along with 22 other members of Congress, wrote a letter urging the Biden administration to dedicate long-term funding to the study and remediation of the issue.
“While DDT was banned more than 50 years ago, we still have only a murky picture of its potential impacts to human health, national security, and ocean ecosystems,” they wrote. “We encourage the administration to think about the next 50 years, creating a long-term national plan within EPA and [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] to address this toxic legacy off the coast of our communities.”
Meanwhile, scientists at the EPA are trying to get a handle on the scope of the issue while also trying to determine what other chemicals, if any, have been dumped into the ocean.
“It’s extremely overwhelming…there’s still so much we don’t know,” said John Chestnutt, a Superfund section manager who leads the EPA’s technical team on the ocean dumping issue. “Whether it’s radioactivity or explosives or what have you, there’s potentially a wide range of contaminants out there that aren’t good for the environment and the food web if they’re really moving through it.”
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