DDT in Yards Blamed on Nearby Plant : Environment: The EPA orders the operators of the long-closed chemical factory in Torrance to dispose of the contaminated soil. The firm questions the decision.

DDT found in two back yards near Torrance this spring appears to have originated from a nearby chemical factory that once was a major producer of the pesticide and is now a federal Superfund site, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday.

The federal government has ordered Montrose Chemical Corp. of California, operators of the long-closed DDT manufacturing plant, to arrange for disposal of hundreds of tons of DDT-laced soil excavated from the yards, at an estimated cost of $2 million.

“We believe we now have enough proof to say this was Montrose’s and then force them to clean it up,” said EPA official John Blevins, speaking to reporters behind two homes where a federal cleanup project uncovered DDT chunks the size of bowling balls.

The agency issued an administrative order late Tuesday requiring Montrose to dispose of 67 bins--or more than 1,000 tons--of tainted soil. That soil, now stored in Long Beach, must be incinerated.

An attorney representing Montrose disagreed with the EPA’s assertion that a link has been found, saying it appears to be based on circumstantial evidence. Montrose had earlier declined to pay for disposal.

However, “their new information is enough for us to take a look at it again,” said Karl Lytz of the law firm Latham & Watkins. He said he expects to confer with federal officials about the order.

The DDT discovery has prompted the temporary relocation of 30 neighborhood families to hotels at federal expense, and Blevins said it is possible that Montrose could eventually be held responsible for those costs as well as the expense of excavating the back yards.

“We haven’t made any decisions yet,” said Blevins, an EPA section chief overseeing the Montrose site.

EPA officials once expressed pessimism that they would ever pinpoint the source of the DDT. Their accounting of how the new evidence was assembled offers a glimpse of how the agency employs chemical tests in hopes of tracking producers of industrial waste.

A key breakthrough came, officials said, with the detection of a second chemical in the back-yard soil, a telltale substance called BHC, or beta-hexachlorocyclohexane, that is a byproduct in the making of the pesticide lindane. Stauffer Chemical Co. operated a lindane production plant at the Montrose site in the late 1950s and early 1960s, according to the EPA order.

Another apparent link was the discovery that white crystalline material dug from the yards was 96% DDT. Such high-potency material is what is referred to as “technical” or industrial-grade DDT, say EPA officials, who add that Montrose was the only company in California manufacturing technical-grade DDT.

Officials said Wednesday that they still have not firmly established how the DDT traveled from Montrose to the back yards. But that investigation is continuing, and the agency hopes to “close that loop” within the next few weeks, said John Lyons, assistant counsel at the EPA regional office in San Francisco.

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Montrose produced DDT from 1947 to 1982 at its factory on Normandie Avenue in the Harbor Gateway area of Los Angeles, about three-tenths of a mile from the yards.

When the once-popular pesticide was banned for most U.S. uses in 1972, the company’s fortunes sank and the factory closed in 1982. The paved-over 13-acre site is now on the federal Superfund list of the nation’s 1,200 most hazardous toxic waste sites.

Many neighbors had paid little heed to Montrose until last winter, when tests discerned mysteriously high levels of DDT in the two yards north of West 204th Street in an unincorporated Los Angeles County area near the intersection of the Harbor and San Diego freeways.

A federal cleanup begun in April intensified when workers found buried white chunks measuring about 760,000 parts per million of DDT--drastically higher than the 100 parts per million level that the EPA considers safe.

Some residents who have complained of nausea, dizziness and other ailments began suspecting that the cause could be the DDT or other chemicals from another nearby toxic waste site.

They grew more fearful when the EPA determined that the back-yard DDT is mixed with fill that could extend farther east along West 204th Street. The agency has promised to study whether some families should be moved permanently.

Two key factors in that decision could be how far the DDT-tainted soil extends and the cost of cleanup. To date, the EPA has spent more than $500,000 to clean up DDT in only two back yards. Meanwhile, the 30 families are expected to remain in hotels and other temporary housing for several months until the federal investigation is completed.

The EPA will discuss the DDT cleanup and other neighborhood concerns at a public meeting at 6 tonight at Van Deene Elementary School, 826 Javelin St., near Vermont Avenue.