Sea Floor DDT Cleanup Would Pose Huge Problems : Palos Verdes: Dredging or capping area are among options. Many say astronomical cost, risk are not worth it.

In 1939 a Swiss chemist won a Nobel Prize for discovering the insect-killing properties of an obscure chemical called DDT. Who could have predicted that, almost six decades later, it would take the same degree of genius to find a way to rid the world of it?

Millions of pounds of DDT waste dumped into Los Angeles County’s sewers in the 1950s and 1960s remain virtually in the exact spot where it was deposited, leaving a “hot footprint” of contaminated sea floor larger than the city of Pasadena and voluminous enough to fill 20 Rose Bowls.

Nature, left on its own, eventually could seal the Palos Verdes shelf like a tomb, burying the massive chemical legacy in an impenetrable layer of sand and silt. But this entombment is excruciatingly slow, and in the meantime, government scientists contend that the DDT is seeping into a menagerie of creatures that feed in marine waters off the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

For federal and local authorities who have grappled with the DDT deposit for decades, helping nature heal such a wound remains an imposing challenge, even with state-of-the-art technology. The contaminated material is not only unparalleled in volume, but much of it lies at ocean depths difficult to reach and on a shelf and slope frequently rattled by earthquakes, storms and currents.

“This project is on a scale that is totally unprecedented,” said Joseph Devinny, associate professor of environmental engineering at USC. “No one has done anything remotely like this in the ocean.”

A newly completed federal report concludes that the skills and hardware exist to cover most of the DDT with sand dropped from a barge, or to excavate and move it to a safer place diked by thick walls. But these fixes carry substantial environmental risks and drawbacks, as well as daunting price tags of $235 million to $1 billion, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report.

“This is a no-win situation,” said Judy Pederson, manager of coastal processes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has worked extensively on cleanups. “You have a fairly high level of risk whatever you do.”

Weighing Options

The federal government is weighing two options to pay for the cleanup, neither quick or palatable: Declare the ocean off Palos Verdes a Superfund site and tap into funds set aside for the nation’s worst toxic dumps, or continue a lengthy legal battle seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages from Montrose Chemical Corp., which manufactured DDT in a plant near Torrance, and six other companies.

There is, though, a third option: Leave it alone.

Many well-respected scientists portray the DDT deposit as a mistake too big for mankind to fix. Nature, they say, will gradually take care of it.

“I say it’s part of the legacy and we just have to live with it,” said Robert Risebrough, a UC Berkeley research ecologist who was the first to discover DDT contamination in Southern California marine life 30 years ago. “That money could be spent on so much more useful environmental things that it would be almost criminal to [clean it up].”

Even environmentalists who advocate strong protection of the ocean have serious doubts about whether the DDT repository will--or even should--ever be cleaned up.

“The dredging option in particular just terrifies me,” said Mark Gold, executive director of Heal the Bay. “It seems way too high of a risk. If it’s a billion dollars, for example, I’ll tell you right now it is not worth doing.”

Leaving the DDT, however, is vastly unpopular with federal wildlife managers who worry that the ecological impacts are too severe to ignore, especially for endangered bald eagles and peregrine falcons on the Channel Islands.

Twenty-three years after the pesticide was outlawed in the United States, eagles are unable to reproduce on Santa Catalina Island because their eggs still contain enough DDT to kill chicks. Peregrine falcons also suffer reduced reproduction due to thinned and broken eggshells, and high amounts of contamination have been found in a variety of fish, dolphins and other aquatic creatures on the Palos Verdes shelf.

While the source of the DDT in the wild animals is hotly disputed by Montrose, the federal government has amassed evidence that points to the ocean deposit.

“This is a massive problem,” said Daniel Welsh, who has studied the Palos Verdes DDT deposit for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “It will need a lot of time and money devoted to it to get the sediment remediation accomplished and restore fish and birds in the food chain.” Eagles could be harmed for 50 years unless the DDT is cleaned up, he estimated.

In the post-World War II years, DDT was heralded by chemists as a miracle product that boosted farm productivity and helped stamp out malaria and other insect-borne diseases. Compared to the era’s other pest-killing chemicals, the compound was considered relatively low in toxicity to humans.

But scientists soon learned of its insidious effects: It accumulates in the fat of all living beings and triggers reproductive problems in animals and perhaps cancer in humans.

Logistic Problems

Today, sediments contaminated with about 100 tons of DDT--a quarter-century of discharge from the chemical plant--still cover 27 square miles of the ocean floor where the chemical flowed from the county’s sewage pipeline off White’s Point.

In its new report, filed as evidence in the lawsuit against the chemical companies, the Army Corps of Engineers concludes that the most feasible option is to leave the deposit in the ocean and construct a six-foot-thick “cap” of clean sand that will seal it like armor, making it inaccessible to worms and shrimp that can spread the contamination throughout the food chain.

The corps, working with Moffatt and Nichol Engineers of Long Beach, estimated the cost at $235 million to $403 million, plus $4 million every year in maintenance.

But civil engineers and oceanographers, who are debating similar though far less ambitious cleanups from Boston Harbor to Seattle, say they are unconvinced that a cap could be built in deep ocean waters without stirring up the DDT. Also, once built, there is no guarantee it would hold through severe earthquakes and storms.

Although underwater caps have been used for years to cover pollution, the Palos Verdes site is unprecedented in size, volume and depth. The DDT lies as deep as 1,312 feet, and even if only the 300-foot-deep shelf portion is covered, the cap would be built in waters five times deeper than anything ever attempted.

Keith Stolzenbach, a UCLA civil and environmental engineer, said the largest cap in the nation, off New York, seems trivial compared to the one contemplated here. Covering an assortment of garbage and chemical wastes, the New York cap is one square kilometer, compared with the Corps’ estimate of 17.4 square kilometers at Palos Verdes.

Dropping heavy material from a barge could create what marine experts call “a mud wave” that would disperse the DDT, making matters worse. The engineers would have to use only fine particles, such as sand, and sprinkle it slowly and uniformly from a pipeline or specially equipped barge. Simply finding enough sand to cover the sprawling deposit would be difficult.

Once installed, a cap would have to be continuously maintained to fix wave and current damage, and a powerful earthquake could liquefy and move it, re-exposing the DDT.

The engineers in the new report, however, say storm erosion would be minimal--no more than two feet of the six-foot cap would erode, and the erosion would occur just around its edges. Liquefaction from earthquakes could be avoided by building a grid of stone ribs to stabilize the cap, according to the Moffatt and Nichol report.

Douglas Sherman, a USC professor of geography and beach erosion, agreed that with enough money, engineers could minimize--although not eliminate--most of the risks.

“Any or all of those alternatives may work, but none can guarantee containment,” he said. “We don’t really understand very well the way that contaminants move.”

Another option--dredging up the DDT--was called “technically feasible” by the Army Corps of Engineers, but it is considered even more problematic. Twelve million cubic meters of DDT-tainted sediment, enough to fill the Los Angeles subway 10 times, would have to be excavated.

“When you decide whether to dredge or not to dredge,” said Mary Henry of the National Biological Service, “one of the big issues is whether you wind up re-suspending all this old DDT that is basically hermetically sealed down there. Does that make it better or make it worse?”

Even if it can be safely excavated, what can be done with such an enormous volume of contaminated silt and sand? Incineration or detoxification would be prohibitive, costing $2 billion to $7 billion, according to the corps report.

Moving it to a special diked cell, probably at the Port of Los Angeles, is more likely, although still costly. Digging a covered storage pit, known as confined aquatic disposal, or constructing a walled-off cell, would cost at least $287 million and perhaps as much as $1 billion, according to Moffatt and Nichols Engineers.

“You may cause more trouble if you try to sequester the sediment,” said one California professor who asked to remain unidentified because he is a consultant to one of the companies sued by the federal government. “I don’t know how you can vacuum up 30 square kilometers of land and dump it behind a rock corral and expect all the bad stuff to stay there.”

Perhaps the biggest drawback of moving the waste is convincing someone to accept it.

Sand and silt to use as fill is often in demand at the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors, but port officials are unlikely to want the stigma of 100 tons contaminated with DDT. A similar U.S. Navy proposal in Seattle was dropped due to opposition from environmental groups.

Although the costs of some toxic waste cleanups have approached $200 million in the United States, none has reached the astronomic figures under consideration at Palos Verdes.

“Short of the Exxon Valdez, there has never been a cleanup costing that much,” Stolzenbach said. “I’m not aware of a single site costing that much.”

A decision on the remedy could take years. In March, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration encountered a major setback when its federal lawsuit seeking millions of dollars for the cleanup from Montrose and its co-owners was dismissed on a legal technicality. An appeal was filed, but even if granted, the Justice Department says the complex case could drag on for another 5 to 10 years.

Pressured by Southern California environmentalists to intervene, EPA officials are reportedly close to naming the site to the Superfund list. Montrose’s now-defunct plant near Torrance is already on the list, and EPA would expand it to encompass the ocean deposit.

On Wednesday, a source within the EPA said the agency is likely to declare the ocean deposit a Superfund site within six weeks.

Vice President Al Gore, speaking Wednesday on the Santa Monica Pier about clean water issues, expressed concern about the lingering effects of the DDT off Palos Verdes. “I know there is some uncertainty about the pathways by which DDT gets into fish and into birds, but clearly any source is a problem,” he said.

Adding Southern California’s precious ocean to the list of the nation’s worst toxic waste sites seems an unpalatable solution. But that move has an advantage that the lawsuit does not--the government can dip into a multibillion-dollar fund to fix the site, then seek reimbursement from Montrose and other companies. The government would not have to prove damage to natural resources, as it must in its lawsuit.

Superfund, however, by no means guarantees a quick solution. In fact, the program has been so bogged down in bureaucracy that many dumps have lingered on the list for 10 to 15 years without even a bucket of waste removed.

“Certainly we have concerns about doing anything here without thinking about all the possible implications,” said Jeff Zelikson, director of the hazardous waste division at the EPA’s western region. “Superfund has been criticized for the unintended litigation and transaction costs. That is certainly an issue we would be concerned about with this site.”

Zelikson said the EPA is considering a cheaper, interim solution of using silt dredged from the Los Angeles Harbor to periodically cover the hot spots.

“No matter what we do,” Zelikson added, “it’s going to take years.”

The contamination could keep leaking into the food chain for another century, according to a computer model developed by the U.S. Geological Service and consultants, including Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientists in Massachusetts.

“I think there certainly is reason for continued concern,” said David Young, a chemist who researched the deposit in the 1970s for the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, a scientific group funded by county sanitation districts.

“Without natural or man-made actions to bury the sediments, the present levels will continue,” he said. “Water washing in and out takes only a very small portion of it out of the area.”

Other scientists, however, disagree. Montrose Chemical Corp. and the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts have long argued that the deposit is being buried by sewage and erosion from the mainland, so it will take care of itself. EPA reached the same conclusion in a 1989 report.

John List, a Caltech engineer overseeing Montrose’s technical team on the case, said the DDT is vanishing by degrading in the ocean, and he estimates that in 10 years, the DDT in the sediments will have shrunk by half, and in 40 years, diminished to six tons.

“Remediation would be utterly stupid in this particular circumstance,” List said. “In due course, the problem will solve itself.”

Ecological Choices

Once the largest manufacturer of a universally used pesticide, Montrose Chemical Corp. now is little more than a corporate shell, maintained solely to pay the lawyers and consultants defending it from the huge federal lawsuit. The company, however, has four co-owners, including Chris-Craft Industries Inc., with considerable assets that the U.S. Justice Department aims to tap.

“I think the case should be dropped, actually,” said UC Berkeley’s Risebrough, one of the nation’s most experienced scientists in DDT research. “The only people involved are lawyers and government agencies and I don’t think their cause is all that pressing. The money will just go to pay lawyers on both sides.”

Risebrough is a staunch defender of natural resources, but he preaches restraint in deciding which problems are tackled and which are left alone.

If the goal is to preserve endangered species, the hundreds of millions of dollars it would take to clean up Palos Verdes’ DDT would be better spent buying Central American rain forests or other bird habitat, Risebrough said. He said the serious ecological impacts are limited to bald eagles on Catalina Island, and that it would be easier and cheaper to maintain eagles there by bringing in eggs or nestlings from the San Francisco Zoo.

“There are a lot cheaper ways to keep bald eagles out there on the Channel Islands,” he said. “It’s criminal to even think of putting this high of a priority on this.”

But U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials say continuous human intervention to keep eagles on Catalina is not a full solution. They argue that the entire natural environment around the DDT deposit is threatened, including dolphins and sea lions that face poorly understood impacts. And people, largely poor minorities, face an elevated cancer risk from eating fish caught off Palos Verdes, officials say.

“What about white croaker, what about the marine mammals? Which species do you choose to help?” said Roger Helm, branch chief of the agency’s natural resource damage assessment response team. “I really dislike playing God.”

So few areas of Southern California are ecologically intact, some wildlife managers say, that it is worth the money to restore a picturesque and popular recreation area like the Channel Islands.

“It is an island ecosystem that really does have a lot of its historic ecological value,” Welsh said. “People go out there to see wildlife, and they would like to see all of the species that historically occurred there, including the predators like eagles and peregrine falcons.”

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Solution to Pollution

Three methods for reducing the environment effects of DDT-contaminated sediments on the ocean floor off Palos Verdes Peninsula are under consideration. Each method carries substantial costs and environmental risks--enough that some experts say the DDT deposit should be left untouched.

1) CONFINED DISPOSAL FACILITY

* DDT-tainted sediment would be excavated at sea and hauled to a diked-off shore area. Tall retaining walls would keep the sediment out of adjacent waters. A 15-foot layer of clean material would sit atop the sediment, and harbor projects could be build on the fill.

Cost: $608 million to $1.04 billion, plus $1.2 million to $2.5 million to annual maintenance.

Drawbacks: Immense amount of material to be dredged and risk of spill into the ocean. Dredging technology required has never been used in U.S. Dikes could fail or leak during storms.

2) CONTAINED AQUATIC DISPOSAL

* The sediment could be excavated from the ocean floor and hauled to a harbor. DDT sediment would be buried in cells under water and six feet of clean sand, confined by stone dikes.

Cost: $287 million to $552 million, plus $1.5 million in annual maintenance.

Drawbacks: Volume of material to be dredged is immense and operation could be contaminate the water. Dredging technology required has never been used in U.S. waters. If cells fail in storms or earthquakes, there could be large releases of DDT into coastal waters.

3) CAPPING

* A six-foot layer of clean sand could be dropped to cover the DDT-tainted sea floor and keep marine creatures from being contaminated.

Cost: $235 million to $403 million, plus $4.1 million in annual maintenance.

Drawbacks: Major engineering challenge. The sand cap would cover 10 square miles, at a depth of 300 feet, and could flow in major earthquakes or erode from storm waves. Requires large volumes of sand that must be spread slowly and evenly to avoid stirring up DDT.

NOTE: Two other options were discarded: Detoxifying the sediment in a treatment plant was considered too expensive, and moving it into deeper water out to sea was too environmentally risky.

Sources: Army Corps of Engineers and Moffatt & Nichol Engineers