Off Palos Verdes, a DDT Dumping Ground Lingers : Environment: Dozens of scientists have been hired by both sides in two suits over pesticide off peninsula coast.

Partly buried on the sea floor, nearly two miles from the craggy bluffs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, lies a ghost of a bygone era: the nation’s largest ocean dumping ground of DDT.

Two hundred feet down, where sunlight is scarce, an estimated 200 tons of DDT extend through nearly 20 square miles of teeming marine habitat, mixed in the mud and sands of ocean sediment.

The chemical was discharged there by sewage lines operated by Los Angeles County until DDT was outlawed by the federal government in 1972. For 20 years, the pesticide has remained undisturbed, a creature of the deep linked by marine biologists to devastating effects on kelp beds, white sea bass, brown pelicans, dover sole and other marine life.

Though most species have rebounded, the DDT still percolates up from the sea floor, winding its way up the food chain. Now, its lingering effect--including a purported cancer risk to humans who eat certain sport fish--are the focal point of two major environmental lawsuits, one of which could set an important precedent in the federal government’s quest to recover damages from private polluters.

The lawsuits have ensnared scientists studying the Palos Verdes shelf in a legal cold war rife with charges of secrecy and collusion. Dozens of researchers have been retained to work for the opposing forces--an alphabet soup of federal agencies that filed the lawsuits, and a handful of private companies and Los Angeles County sanitation agencies accused of despoiling the coastal waters.

Long after author Rachel Carson’s environmental wake-up call, “Silent Spring,” triggered a nationwide crusade against the powerful pesticide, scores of scientists are working to quantify the effects of the Palos Verdes DDT field. Yet even as some researchers struggle to identify those effects, others strive to discount them.

And much of the work on either side is being done in secret. Many researchers have been asked to sign confidentiality pledges--a requirement that scientists say has a marked chilling effect on the flow of valuable information that should be shared.

“The lawyers have taken over the science,” complains marine researcher Bruce Thompson of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, one of the few public agencies that remains above the fray. “It’s kind of crazy.”

In one of the lawsuits, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is seeking unspecified damages--upward of $100 million, one source estimates--for alleged environmental destruction caused by the DDT discharges of two decades ago. Major defendants in that action include the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts and Montrose Chemical Corp., once the nation’s largest maker of the pesticide.

Los Angeles County’s current sewage-discharging practices also are being challenged in court by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which hopes to clean up the continuing flow of waste water into the ocean. The county argues that a cleanup would cost $375 million and, ironically, actually cause harm to the environment by slowing the gradual buildup of sediments over the DDT field.

“Everybody I know is working on one side or the other,” said marine biologist John S. Stephens of Occidental College, who is doing secret work for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Stephens estimates that as many as 100 scientists may be under contract to the oceanic agency or to its corporate adversaries, recruited from universities and private research labs throughout the country.

But little of their research is making headlines, even in the obscure pages of scientific journals. Few residents who live, eat and swim along the Los Angeles coastline are aware of the legal skirmishes or the lingering DDT field that sparked the battles.

From the Palos Verdes Peninsula, a hilly outcropping of rock topped with luxury homes and condominiums, the only evidence of the legal battles is the occasional peaceful intrusion of research vessels on the sea below.

“I’ve never heard of the DDT out there,” said Mark Waring, 28, an avid ocean swimmer who seeks out the rocky Palos Verdes coast for snorkel diving--to no ill effects. “(But) I’d avoid seafood caught in local waters. Living in L.A., you almost expect bad things as far as the environment goes.”

Such caution is apparently well-founded. For more than a decade, marine biologists had linked DDT to harmful effects on other Palos Verdes marine life. Kelp beds--lush habitats for some creatures--all but vanished. White sea bass and brown pelicans dwindled sharply in number. Dover sole, a common flatfish, suffered degenerative fin rot.

After scientists alarmed the public about the problems, those species appear to have recovered. But high levels of DDT contamination in one bottom-dwelling Palos Verdes fish, the white croaker, continues to render it unsafe for human consumption. Public health officials have erected signs on local piers warning residents not to eat the tainted species. And commercial fishing on the Palos Verdes coast is now banned by the state for the same reason.

Lured to Palos Verdes by the DDT field and other environmental concerns, research vessels ply the coastal waters, taking “grab samples” of sediments from the ocean floor. Dropping nets and instruments into the depths, they count and analyze tiny bottom-dwelling animals, monitor currents and the movement of contaminated sediments and trawl for fish that are later bred and dissected in marine laboratories.

Marine biologist Stephens takes to sea regularly in Occidental’s 85-foot ship, the Vantuna. USC scientists, who conduct a variety of federally funded marine research projects every year, operate three vessels--a 220-foot former tuna boat, a 72-foot craft used to take them to a laboratory on Santa Catalina Island, and a 65-foot ship used for near-shore studies.

Other schools, independent marine consulting firms and government agencies, such as the county sanitation districts, add to the flotilla. But with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in the lawsuits, the research has intensified, and new and sometimes mysterious vessels now ply the coastal waters.

For several weeks this summer, one large 220-foot boat registered to the U.S. Geological Survey was stationed off Palos Verdes, conducting secret work on behalf of the federal government.

“We’re out there all the time, so when some big scientific vessel like that is out there for weeks on end, you notice it,” said Robert W. Horvath, an administrator with the county sanitation districts, which operate a 65-foot research vessel called Ocean Sentinel. “We never found out exactly what they were doing.”

This quiet scientific struggle--expected to last another two years, unless one of the major lawsuits is settled out of court--has fostered no surface hostilities, scientists say. But the clandestine work that revolves around the two lawsuits has raised troubling questions.

Some researchers fear that vows of confidentiality may be forcing them to sign away their valued traditions of free communication and peer review, cherished practices that help to assure the accuracy of scientific findings.

“I can communicate, but . . . only with people who are approved,” Stephens noted, saying, “I don’t like that, but that’s the way it is.”

This absence of peer review creates a danger that scientists on opposing sides might skew their studies to “prove” what they hope to prove--instead of finding objective answers, according to Rachelle Hollander of the ethics and values section of the National Science Foundation. The result, she said, might be courtroom arguments that are based on conflicting numbers and data, only confusing the picture.

“One (scientist) can select certain parameters on which to evaluate (data) that are perfectly acceptable to one group of scientists--and perfectly acceptable to ‘science’--and get one result,” Hollander said, “and another group can select different parameters . . . and give you different answers.

“The results, then, aren’t going to resolve the controversy.”

Lawyers in the case say they have little concern that researchers in their employ are being muzzled or that science is being compromised in efforts to bolster legal arguments.

“We’re not trying to keep things secret,” said one federal attorney. “It’s less a question of secrecy than how the information gets out--the timing of disclosure. . . . The parties will get access to this information through the (legal) discovery process.”

Some scientists fear, however, that even after the suits are resolved, much valuable research information will remain sealed in private corporate files.

“Litigation is not a good thing for science,” concedes David Rosenberg-Wohl, an attorney for Westinghouse Corp., one of the defendants in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suit. “Science is not an adversary process--litigation is.”

Researchers say the most worrisome aspect of the adversary process is that it has overtaken their work at a point when they have just begun to understand the intricate relationships between marine organisms and the environment.

The task of determining how contaminants move through the food chain--and which ones are responsible for damage to marine life--can be mind-boggling, scientists say. When ocean kelp vanished, for example, scientists linked its disappearance to heavy DDT contamination. But that loss, some scientists speculated, might have been affected by other chemicals, temperature fluctuations or changes in water clarity.

Fish have been studied in recent years for DDT and PCBs contamination. Those efforts have centered on the varieties most commonly caught from piers and sportfishing boats, particularly those that tend to restrict their movements to the shelf.

In addition to stamping a “Do Not Consume” label on white croaker, state officials also recommend that consumers eat only limited quantities of sculpin, rock fishes and kelp bass. And they note that other fish show lesser concentrations of DDT and PCBs.

The oceanic administration lawsuit is likely to use evidence of contamination and the apparent detrimental effects on fish populations to prove its case, according to one scientist who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

Brian Gorman, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the lawsuit is a test case of the agency’s intent to force private polluters to offset the costs of their environmental damage. Although the government has had legal authority to pursue such cases since Congress passed Superfund legislation in 1980, federal agencies were slow to use those tools during the less environmentally conscious Reagan years, Gorman said.

If the action is successful, he added, the government would carry the fight to polluters in industrialized areas on the East Coast.

“It’s the first time, on this scale,” he said, “we have told polluters they will pay for their free use of the country’s natural resources.”

Attorneys for the corporate defendants say they will challenge the suit on the basis that the companies dumped their contaminants legally under valid sewage discharge permits.

Karl S. Lytz, a lawyer for Montrose Chemical, which is accused of dumping almost all the DDT off the Palos Verdes coast, has even questioned the accuracy of federal and county calculations that there are 200 tons of DDT on the ocean floor.

“We weren’t anxious to throw DDT away,” he said.

Lytz criticized the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for failing to show more evidence of direct damage from the pesticide before it filed the suit against owners of the now-dismantled chemical plant in 1990. The lawsuit was filed hastily to meet statute-of-limitations deadlines, federal officials acknowledge.

“The brown pelican population has fully recovered,” the Montrose lawyer said. “The government says mammals may be injured through the suppression of their immune systems--yet there is no evidence of that. And when you ask for it, none is produced. We certainly don’t see any existing injuries to the environment caused by DDT--period.”

In the EPA lawsuit, the sanitation districts are fighting to continue their current sewage discharge practices at Palos Verdes, where 320 million gallons of waste water enter the ocean each day. Roughly two-thirds of that water now meets federal requirements for secondary treatment, which removes most of the organic solids, bacteria, viruses and chemical contaminants that can alter the marine habitat.

But county officials have balked at spending the millions of dollars necessary for cleaning up the rest of the effluent. Federal regulators are now pressing the issue, charging that the existing waste-water flow does not assure a “balanced, indigenous population” of animals on the ocean floor, as the law requires.

The county’s defense--and one of its chief arguments in trying to obtain a waiver from the federal law--is that today’s waste water, with its heavier concentration of solids, is more effective in building a “cap” of sediments over the DDT field.

The faster those sediments build up, they say, the less the ocean is polluted by DDT filtering out of the ocean floor. Scientists estimate that two tons is freed every year.

“We’re willing to go to (full) secondary treatment if the DDT problem is solved,” the sanitation districts’ Horvath said. “But right now, nobody has any means of solving the DDT problem.”

Twenty years since DDT was last targeted as a major environmental health threat, scientists are still unsure what will prevent the Palos Verdes pesticide field from playing more havoc with marine life.

These days, environmentalists dream grandly about dredging the DDT out, although they concede that in the process much of it might escape into the ocean. Other ideas bruited about include covering the toxic field with clean sediments--if the cost allows--or neutralizing it with other chemicals or microorganisms, tactics that are, at best, unproven.

“You’re talking about millions and millions of cubic yards of material (at) depths of up to a couple hundred feet,” Horvath said. “You’re sort of trying to do the impossible.”

The DDT Discharge Zone

Federal law is aimed at preserving a “balanced, indigenous population” of marine life. Near the Palos Verdes Peninsula, decades of sewage discharges have changed much of the sea floor. Although DDT dumping ended in the 1970s, heavy metals, bacteria and oil byproducts still pour into the ocean daily from sewage outfalls operated by the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts.

Here are some key features of the ocean floor:

1. Sewage outfalls: They release about 320 million gallons a day of treated sewage at the sea bottom 1 1/2 miles from shore. About 200 million gallons receive treatment complying with federal regulations and the remainder receives less-thorough treatment.

2. Normal sea floor: The presence of the brittle star, or Amphiodia urtica , indicates an unchanged sea floor, scientists say. In normal sediments, the tiny, sensitive starfish number about 1,000 per square meter. Its numbers are half that in transitional zones, and they are not found near the outfalls.

3. Changed zone: An area where today’s sewage discharges are linked to significant changes in populations of marine animals. Scientists use tiny worms, Capitella capitata , as a barometer of those changes. The worms number about two per square meter in normal bottom mud, but their numbers rise to 2,500 per square meter at the outfalls. At the same time, many other bottom-dwelling species disappear.

4. Transitional zone: An area moderately affected by sewage discharges. Tiny clams called Parvilucina tenuisculpta are common here, numbering 1,400 per square meter. In normal sediments, the population is below 100 per meter. In this zone, more species exist because of the nutrients present in waste-water, but that increase suggests an imbalance in marine populations.

5. DDT zone: About 20 square miles, contaminated by DDT dumping in the 1960s and early 1970s. About half the contamination is concentrated in four square miles surrounding the county outfalls, scientists believe.

Declining Discharges

Before the 1972 federal ban on DDT, the pesticide was manufactured in Los Angeles by the Montrose Chemical Co. and regularly discharged to the sea floor through waste-water outfalls. In the years since the dumping stopped, the DDT discharge has been slowed largely to traces washing from sewage pipes.

Discharges over a 20-year period: 1971: 46,253 1991: 9 SOURCES: Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, marine scientist Bruce Thompson of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project.