$67-Million Settlement Reached for DDT Cleanup

Environmental officials have won $67 million to help restore ocean resources damaged by a massive deposit of DDT under a settlement with 150 Southern California municipalities and three corporations approved this week by a federal judge.

The agreement ends part of a lawsuit that has dragged on since 1990 over contamination that has lingered on the ocean floor off the Palos Verdes Peninsula for several decades.

A sprawling deposit of the pesticide DDT and industrial compounds called PCBs lies two miles offshore, at the point where the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts dispose of treated sewage and industrial waste. Millions of pounds of the chemicals were reportedly discharged there between the 1940s and the early 1970s, when they were banned in the United States.

Scientists say the contamination is still harming marine life off California’s coast, including bald eagles on Santa Catalina Island that are unable to reproduce and fish in Santa Monica Bay that are considered too toxic for people to eat.

Approved Thursday by U.S. District Judge A. Andrew Hauk, the agreement includes $45.7 million in damages paid by Los Angeles County and 150 cities in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties. The local governments were held responsible because businesses and households there used the county sanitation system.

An additional $12 million comes from two paper companies--Potlatch Corp. and Simpson Paper Co.--and $9.5 million comes from CBS Corp., formerly Westinghouse.

The brunt of the case--against Montrose Corp., which manufactured DDT near Torrance--remains unsettled. U.S. Justice Department attorneys are seeking around $170 million from Montrose and five related companies. The government says it needs $225 million to $250 million to seal the deposit and repair damaged resources.

“This is a step in the right direction and it gets us started,” said Steven O’Rourke, the lead Justice Department attorney in the case. “But we need more money and we will try to get that money from Montrose and the other companies. There are still a lot of [natural resource] injuries and human health risks out there.”

The $45.7 million is the same figure as in a settlement approved in 1993 but thrown out two years later by an appeals court because the amounts seemed to be arbitrarily set.

In the new settlement, the attorneys included reasons for how the damages were apportioned. The municipalities will pay roughly 20% of the total the government is seeking. Montrose Corp. unsuccessfully argued that the county and cities should pay a larger share.

Officials from the county sanitation agency were unavailable for comment Friday.

The funds, plus interest, have been sitting in escrow for six years and are ready to be spent by various federal and state resource agencies that are the plaintiffs in the case. They include the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the California Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

About half will be used to restore or replace damaged resources. Specific projects have not been chosen, but they could include building wetlands, stocking fisheries and reintroducing eagles and peregrine falcons.

The other half goes to the EPA, which hopes to eventually seal part of the deposit by putting clean sediment on the Palos Verdes Shelf. The EPA has declared the ocean off Palos Verdes a Superfund site of the nation’s most hazardous dump sites but has not released a strategy or time frame for handling it.

Montrose Corp. contends that the DDT is degrading and gradually sealing itself with natural accumulations of sediment, so there is no reason for the EPA to seek money to fix the problem.