25,000 Barrels of DDT Discovered Between Long Beach and Catalina Island

While sailing up the coast from Long Beach to San Francisco recently, we’d been looking at the chart below as we navigated our way along coastal Southern California. However, we never noticed the small type on the chart saying ‘Dump Site,’ about 12 miles offshore from Long Beach. Not many people appear to have paid much attention to it until 2021, when David Valentine, a professor of biology and earth science at the University of California Santa Barbara, took some underwater photos. They turned out to show leaking barrels with exceptionally high concentrations of DDT and lots of other chemical waste.

Apparently, Montrose Chemical Corporation in Los Angeles was the largest producer of DDT in the world when Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring came out and people began to look at these ‘miracle’ chemicals a bit differently. DDT was eventually banned in the ’70s — a time when people thought 3,000-foot-deep trenches in the ocean were a great place to get rid of stuff too toxic for life on land.

The recent expedition, by a group of scientists led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has now completed a mapping of the dumping zone and found over 25,000 leaking barrels, as well as quite a few empty Jose Cuervo and Corona bottles. Of course we know this huge, toxic site remains just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to industrial waste that people have been attempting to hide in the oceans for decades.

On your next sail over to Catalina you can read the full story in the New York Times here. While the chart shows a clearly marked ‘Dump Site’ circle, investigators say they’ve discovered many more toxic barrels outside previously documented dumping sites. We doubt many people find this surprising. It can be hard to land your toxic waste in the circle as you push it over the side while bobbing around on the surface. For now, it remains 3,000 feet down and miles from the coast and Catalina, but that is not much comfort to the ocean and the sealife that calls this area home.

The good news is that the use of the ocean as a dumping ground has been dramatically curtailed, and discoveries such as this continue to shift our way of thinking and the opportunities we have to improve the health of the oceans.