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L.A.'s coast was once a DDT dumping ground, but no one could see it until now

341 points by rblion 6y ago

dusted 6y ago
It's amazing how little some people have cared, this was not that they didn't know, they certainly knew, otherwise, it'd not have resorted to hiding the stuff by dumping it into the sea.. It'd not be unreasonable to hunt down those responsible, and make them pay for cleaning it up. Sure, they're probably dead by now, but they probably left a lot of money. I don't think it's even relevant that "it was not illegal at the time", they knew the stuff was toxic, and they chose to release it into the oceans, just because no one had explicitly made a law banning them from doing so.. Common sense should be the first law.
- relix 6y ago
  One of the first paragraphs of the article: at the time it was considered dumping the barrels in the deep ocean was sufficient because the vast amount of water would dilute the chemical. The shortcut they took was that they did not go that far into the ocean but instead kept much closer to shore and dumped the barrels there, as well as punctured them when they floated. The discovery that's lamented is the "shortcut dumping ground". This does not fit with your jumped-to conclusions.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- sokoloff 6y ago
  He didn’t, but suppose my grandfather legally (or even semi-legally) disposed of some DDT and left my father some money. My father later me some money. What’s the legal process to claw some of that money back to pay for the cleanup? Do you or the state have standing to sue me for something I never did, knew nothing about, and can’t reasonably answer to any specifics about?
  - meed2000 6y ago
    Suing you to the extent of having to pay back whatever your father passed on to you, at least what's left of it would be reasonable, don't you think?
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      No, I do not. If my grandfather left my father $X, my father left me $Y, at the very most the maximum would have to be the lesser of $X and $Y, decremented by the full cost of answering the lawsuit. This is problematic from a variety of practical angles, though, not just mathematical ones. It seems like something the forensic accounting lobby would salivate over. Should I be forced to defend a lawsuit because my great^6 grandfather owned slaves? (As far as I know, none did.) That’s more abhorrent than legally dumping chemicals that today’s common sense says should have been done differently.
      - dubcanada 6y ago
        But if you grandfather lost all of $X, your father would not have any of $Y (based entirely on $X being an amount they got from business dealings and $Y being a smaller amount which came from $X).
        sokoloff 6y ago
        That strikes me as non-sensical. My father had his own earning, creating, and saving abilities.
        pessimizer 6y ago
        Subtract it from what he would have earned if he had dumped the cash into an index fund, and we may find that his earning, creating and saving abilities were negative. His only profitable skill may have been having a father who dealt in slaves.
      - dathinab 6y ago
- macspoofing 6y ago
  The problem with your approach, besides the immorality of arbitrary post-hoc rationalization for punishment, is that it is not pragmatic. What's done is done, and you need people to get behind making it better. If you come out and push a policy that in part entails rooting and punishing those responsible (or even descendent of those responsible), you'll have people come out against it just for that reason and the environment will suffer. I would be one of those people, because I would never give that power to the kinds of people who would argue for the arbitrary execution of collective punishments on people today. If given the choice to fix environment/punish wrongdoers or do nothing, I would go with 'do nothing'. It's why 'The Green New Deal' is so terrible because instead of focusing on pragmatic solutions we can all get behind, it suffers from scope creep of socialist and progressive policies that have little to nothing to do with climate change and environment - and therefore I'd rather have none of it. To circle back on collective punishment - there's a reason why the North, after winning the civil war, has largely chose not to collectively punish the South - in much the same way that other regions which suffered through terrible civil wars where terrible crimes were committed, frequently choose to replace punishment of many of those responsible with something like reconciliation committees, where symbolic gestures are accepted in lieu of prison or capital punishment.
  - Hokusai 6y ago
    > post-hoc punishment post-hoc punishment is the only reasonable punishment. The alternative it to punish people before they commit a crime, and that seems immoral at best. > push a policy My guess, it was already illegal to poison the environment. They just got caught now. > those responsible with something like reconciliation committees ... symbolic gestures are accepted in lieu of prison or capital punishment. Corporations are not people. You can punish a corporation without any of that considerations.
    - macspoofing 6y ago
      >post-hoc punishment is the only reasonable punishment. Maybe a little charitable interpretation is warranted? I clearly meant, post hoc rationalization for the punishment. Typically you punish when AN EXISTING law is broken. In this case, OP is arguing for new punishment based on new laws that were broken in the past. >My guess, it was already illegal to poison the environment No. The devil is in the definition of 'poison the environment'. We have coal plants that 'poison the environment'. We have solar panels, that through manufacturing, maintenance and decommissioning, 'poison the environment'. >Corporations are not people. You can punish a corporation without any of that considerations. Who owns corporations? This "corporations are not people" is such a cliché. All the rights that corporations have stem from the rights of the owners. Corporations have rights, because the owners have rights. And who says the corporations are solely responsible? An unincorporated contractor may be responsible as well.
- tsdlts 6y ago
  "I don't think it's even relevant that it was not legal at the time". Imagine setting the precedent that the government can unilaterally decide to steal your property based on something your great grandfather did which wasn't even a crime. Do you not see how such a power might be abused in future when you can retroactively punish people for laws where the ink has yet to dry and that they never even committed?
  - phkahler 6y ago
    Ex post facto laws are forbidden by the US constitution.
    - btilly 6y ago
      Only for criminal laws. Ex post facto laws allowing civil suits to be brought would be a different matter.
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
    That's a good point. Where's the line between knowingingly circumventing the spirit of the law by following the letter. For example Teflon has been replaced with chemically similar compounds that just aren't Teflon. It'll take decades for the studies to come in, in the mean time every human is being exposed to these chemicals in significant amounts. Then we have bpa, Neonicotinoids and other pesticides. We have cases where companies knowingly sell talc contaminated with asbestos for decades. We know these products kill people, we now the companies that make thenknow they are killing people and yet we can't claw back decades of fraudulently acquired profits and revenues? Imo, we should treat these behaviors like Nazis where everything they touched gets seized, even decades later. If that ruins some lives, well, whose worse off? The injured class or the child who inherited blood money?
    - tsdlts 6y ago
      Isn't this a regulation failure though? The fact that these chemicals who we don't know the full effects of are let to market is the problem. Preventative measures make more sense than criminalizing things only when we find out there's a problem. Also, what if the company has been acquired since then, is it still on the hook? What if they've since switched markets entirely? What if the company disbanded and the founders created a new company in the same market? There's no clean way to deal out punishment in a legally unambiguous or overreaching way.
- bsenftner 6y ago
  > Common sense should be the first law. That won't work, we have an entire political party in the United States hell bent on making sure people have no common sense. The GOP are a selfish cancer on civilization.
- relativitypro 6y ago
  1. This dumping was litigated in the 60s and happened before this 2. You can’t predict the future 3. This is the efficient market at work, don’t solve any problem until it becomes a social, political or environmental reality you can’t legalese your way around.
- billyhoffman 6y ago
  > I don't think it's even relevant that "it was not illegal at the time" The idea that a government can make something illegal and retroactively punish previous offenders is so colossally bad that in the United States the Founding Fathers wrote a prohibition against it into the Constitution. It's not an amendment, such as the right to free speech. They wrote it into Article 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law.
  - mattmanser 6y ago
    It's nowhere near as clear cut as you make it out. There are even plenty of examples in the page you link of justifiable ex post facto laws. For example war crimes. To be honest, because of the devastating long term effects of environmental pollution, and the deaths it has caused, I would quite happily argue that laws applying to it could be ex post facto. Crimes against future generations. I remember covering this in my philosophy degree and you can argue about it for hours. The example I remember was Nazi collaborators who reported on Jews or resistance fighters or even falsely accused neighbours. They got people killed, often maliciously, but what they did was perfectly legal at the time. Should they have gotten away with their complicity or should they have ex post facto laws brought against them? In the time of the US founders, the scale of damage a single human or company could conceivably do for profit was a lot less.
  - gpm 6y ago
    It seems unlikely that this would be retroactive. It would probably fall under some pre existing statute like vandalism.
    - leptons 6y ago
      "Causing environmental catastrophe" seems like it should be covered by some kind of law in the last 70 or 80 years since DDT started production. They knew how toxic the substance was and how long-lived it was, there is no guessing game as to whether it was a bad idea, even at the time. It has more to do with tolerance of callousness and stupidity in previous decades than it has to do with there not being a specific law against dumping specifically DDT into the ocean.
- vaccinator 6y ago
  > Common sense should be the first law. That's how I thought it was when I was a kid... now I can only wish it was in some instances.
- dahdum 6y ago
  > It's amazing how little some people have cared, this was not that they didn't know, they certainly knew, otherwise, it'd not have resorted to hiding the stuff by dumping it into the sea. > Common sense should be the first law They weren't hiding anything, the bulk went to government designated dumping sites. Shortcuts were taken, but it was known and accepted that these were being dumped into the ocean. Common sense at the time was "dilution is the solution to pollution".
- b0tzzzzzzman 6y ago
  Adding the latimes.com to my do not click or read mental list. So tired of pop ups or full on blocks just to glance at an article. Yeah I could easily resolve it.. So could the LA Times. Firefox Focus shouldnt need to allow trackers/cookies ... Miss the old days when people posted direct archive links.
- mywacaday 6y ago
  The tobacco and sugar industry were/are no different. Makes you wonder what else will be in same bucket in 20 years. Anyone care to hazard a guess?
refurb 6y ago
I’d probably be more worried about the nerve gas and mustard gas munitions dumped into the ocean after WW2. Far more toxic.
- Shivetya 6y ago
  My go to article for that, I have posted this link[0] many times. Scary as it is what is worse this is only that which we know of and not was dumped by governments or agencies that did not want it known. Just look back at WW2 and the number of merchant ships[1] that were sunk! Then throw in all the warships that went down during both world wars. Of course we have quite a bit of radioactive material in the oceans as well[2][3] [0]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decaying-weapons-world-war-II-threaten-waters-worldwide-180961046/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decaying-weapo... [1] http://www.usmm.org/shipsunkdamaged.html http://www.usmm.org/shipsunkdamaged.html [2] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/stevens2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/stevens2/ [3] https://e360.yale.edu/features/radioactivity_in_the_ocean_diluted_but_far_from_harmless https://e360.yale.edu/features/radioactivity_in_the_ocean_di...
- 1propionyl 6y ago
  I wouldn't. Neither mustard nor sarin gas is nearly as resilient to breakdown as DDT. They break down at a much faster rate and ought not to undergo such extreme bioaccumulation.
  - fogihujy 6y ago
    Fishermen still end up with the stuff in their nets, 75 years after WWII ended and it's still quite dangerous. Sure, DDT may stay a problem further into the future, but WWII munitions are still a very current issue.
    - 1propionyl 6y ago
      Yes, of course. No disagreement there. But one leaking barrel of DDT will affect an ecosystem for far longer than one leaking barrel of Sarin, and do more damage where it hurts the ecosystem the most by accumulating as it creeps up the trophic pyramid.
iBotPeaches 6y ago
Well that was a sad article to read on a Monday morning. If this is what we've just scratched the surface on - I'm nervous to what we don't know in terms of ocean dumping.
- refurb 6y ago
  If that depresses you, don’t look up what they dumped in the North Sea after WW2.
  - tsjq 6y ago
    Made me curious. And I searched. Found this one. Yikes ! https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decaying-weapons-world-war-II-threaten-waters-worldwide-180961046/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decaying-weapo...
- pjc50 6y ago
  Greenpeace did a lot of work in the 80s and 90s against the dumping of nuclear waste, including direct action against the ships doing the dumping. This led to the London Dumping Convention. More recently, see e.g. Trafigura https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-10735255 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-10735255 (and what they've tried to hide with libel lawsuits) The WW2 stuff is bad but seems now to be inert, although occasionally someone finds a phosphorous shell on a beach in Scotland. https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/a-dangerous-guide-to-beachcombing/3008056.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/a-dangerous-guide-to-bea... More seriously, there is the SS Richard Montgomery, not dumped but sank during the war, carrying a thousand tons of explosives ... right next to London. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery
obilgic 6y ago
great article, but whats up with putting things on top of each other? https://i.imgur.com/ZztDMIr.png https://i.imgur.com/ZztDMIr.png
- ebina-chonk 6y ago
  I think AdNauseam would solve this problem.
faitswulff 6y ago
> “We found actual photos of the workers at 2 in the morning dumping — not only dumping barrels off of the barges in the middle of the Santa Monica Basin,” he said, “but before they would dump the barrels, they would take a big ax or hatchet to them, and cut them open on purpose so they would sink.” Incredible.
- 1propionyl 6y ago
  See? This is why we don't need environmental regulations. The market will regulate itself if externalities are properly priced in! (Just pay no mind to how those externalities might be systematically priced and how penalties might be retroactively enforced. If you do you're a freedom-hating socialist!)
  - faitswulff 6y ago
    > A pilot experiment more than a decade ago to bury the DDT [at the Palos Verdes superfund site] under a thick cap of clean sand showed mixed results. Then sampling in 2009 suggested that most of the DDT had mysteriously vanished — prompting a burst of headlines and more internal paralysis. The longtime project manager unexpectedly retired, and many of the scientists who had dedicated decades of their careers to the chemical have also either retired or moved on. The fact that DDT outlasted the scientists' careers is another strike (among many) against untrammeled libertarian free market thinking.
    - 1propionyl 6y ago
      Ah, so the front fell off. In that case the DDT was just transported outside of the environment. There's nothing there, except water, and fish, and birds. (In case it isn't clear to anyone, this is heavy sarcasm and a reference to a well known satirical skit.)
      - mercer 6y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
SeriousM 6y ago
Asking not to use a private session is the same as a paywall. Why is it allowed to post such articles?
LittlePeter 6y ago
I was waiting for the DDT acronym to be explained, but no. IMHO no matter how obvious an acronym may be, it should be explained, something like "DDT (D... D... T...) is highly dangerous". Apparently: "Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly known as DDT, is a colorless, tasteless, and almost odorless crystalline chemical compound, an organochlorine." edit: added explanation
- 1propionyl 6y ago
  Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane. DDT.
- jameshart 6y ago
  It’s in paragraph 12, about 1/7 of the way in, after the scene setting opening bit about the barrels. > The world today wrestles with microplastics, bisphenol A (BPA), per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and other toxics so unnatural they don’t seem to ever go away. But DDT — the all-but-indestructible compound dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, which first stunned and jolted the public into environmental action — persists as an unsolved and largely forgotten problem.
- gattilorenz 6y ago
  To be honest, DDT is like "IBM". It might mean "International Business Machines", but many people wouldn't immediately recognize it unless the acronym is used (while the opposite is true: if you know what the acronym stands for, you usually know the acronym as well). And I'm sure Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane wouldn't add much for most people that read a newspaper :)
  - LittlePeter 6y ago
    Even from the context, it was not clear to me what DDT was. I suspected it was some chemical. I would have appreciated a sentence or two explaining why it is bad and what it does. What IBM is would typically be clear from the context: "IBM reported record loss in 2nd quarter of 2020".
    - 6y ago
wombatmobile 6y ago
I came to this story after several days immersed in reading the ancient history of peoples who migrated east across the Pacific 5,000 years ago to form the island nations that are dotted over thousands of square miles of ocean to the west of California. What strikes me as strange is that Californians, or Americans, don't see themselves as one nation of people with one overriding interest - to keep their ecosystem pure and habitable so their people can thrive and prosper. I know that's naive. In America individuals are free to pursue any activity that is permitted by law. Prosperity is measured in dollars, and breaches of the law require a lot of dollars to be exposed and rectified. The national purpose works differently to other countries, particularly smaller nations in which the people are more in contact with nature every day. Still, I can't help but wonder whether most Americans would be happier if things worked differently, and catastrophes like the DDT dump were able to be rectified in a unified national effort. I'm not sure why that doesn't happen, or what makes it so unlikely.
happy_path 6y ago
Wouldn't be possible to make controlled explosions to consume submerged hazardous materials, like DDT? I know it is a drastic solution, but would it make sense?
- jimktrains2 6y ago
  Only if the thing is chemically consumed, otherwise you just spread it around unchanged. I don't believe DDT would be consumed in any normal explosion.
  - asdff 6y ago
    What is the solution then? Concrete case and hope it doesn't leak?
dan-robertson 6y ago
Wikipedia has the half life of DDT in soil from 22 days to 30 years. In a marine environment it is estimated to be 150 years.
- basicplus2 6y ago
  I didn't know Wikipedia had a half life..
ogurechny 6y ago
The lesson here is that big businesses will argue that their operations are correct not just out of neglect, but knowing perfectly well that they are not. Now let's look at what we have in IT today…
jdlyga 6y ago
Jake the Snake was also a DDT dumping ground. Dumping your ass with a DDT, you're welcome.
spodek 6y ago
This community is so quick to embrace new technologies and so dismissive of unintended side effects. We cringe at DDT dumps but loved it at the time. Do we not expect similar unintended side effects from other things this community endorses like fusion or seeding the atmosphere with reflecting materials? We do this to Earth and we think we'll do better on Mars?
- Google234 6y ago
  DDT saved 10s if millions of lives. Makes sense that people liked it
stanski 6y ago
It's easy to get outraged (as we should) when we hear about a developing country recklessly polluting the environment but it's important to remember that the West has been doing this on a very large scale for a very long time. Climbing onto this (somewhat) high horse hasn't been an overnight process.
- WhompingWindows 6y ago
  Developing or developed, basically every country engages in questionable environmental practices. The developed nations have the current edge, since many of their offenses occurred in the past and they are less accountable now...just like these DDT barrels.
EvanKnowles 6y ago
Apart from the awfulness of it all, anyone else get EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus vibes from the photos?
aaron695 6y ago
DDT is effectively harmless. You can eat it and be fine for a bet. In an ocean, even if you swapped these barrels for a real poison it doesn't matter. It dilutes to nothing. The insanity on HN about this, I hope clarifies their intelligence on everything. To go to these commentators for their view on say, Rust, is just as insane. And this isn't about stupidity, the banning of DDT was criminal, it killed many many people. Perhaps in the millions. But it was poor people. And this is why HN continues this attitude. It wasn't real people killed to them.
- yeezul 6y ago
  Did you even read the article?
- NathanKP 6y ago
  We know for a fact that DDT has a serious impact on wildlife. Humans aren't special. If something is causing tumors in wildlife as DDT did then it will cause increased cancer risk in humans as well. And studies have shown that DDT travels up the food chain to higher animals as they eat lower animals, gaining more and more concentration each time. Since humans are the ultimate apex predator that eats other stuff on this planet we need to be really careful about the chemicals we release into the environment, unless we want to end up poisoning ourselves. It's not complicated: creating and dumping large amounts of a long lived chemical that does not break down easily, and which causes increased cancer risk is a really bad idea.
  - aaron695 6y ago
    > If something is causing tumors in wildlife as DDT did No it didn't. But we are a post fact world I guess? It did cause eggshells to thin in some birds. But chocolate kills dogs.
x87678r 6y ago
While this dumping is horrific you also have to understand how beneficial DDT was: > Between 1945 and 1965, DDT saved millions-even tens of millions-of lives around the world, perhaps more than any other man-made drug or chemical before or since. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/07/02/the-mosquito-killer https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/07/02/the-mosquito-k...
- WhompingWindows 6y ago
  Couldn't bug nets have achieved the same effect without poisoning the biosphere?
  - stonogo 6y ago
    Not even almost. I've never gone to sleep in a netted bed without waking up with mosquitos on the inside of it, and I don't know anyone who has.
  - staplers 6y ago
    Those nets would be made of plastic and likely end up in the ocean at some point. If we mass-distributed them, even worse.
  - carapace 6y ago
    Yes, people distribute mosquito nets to reduce incidence of malaria. It's a thing. > The most effective means of preventing malaria is sleeping under a mosquito net, specifically a long-lasting insecticide treated net (LLIN). ~ https://www.againstmalaria.com/WhyNets.aspx https://www.againstmalaria.com/WhyNets.aspx
- relativitypro 6y ago
  1. Saving human lives may not be the best metric (given that even this metric is evolving in time, and I claim unknowable) 2. The green revolution benefits were several orders more significant, and will be seen as the spark that enabled climate change. Responsibly using technology is our biggest task.
dajomu 6y ago
The half-life of DDT in an aquatic environment is about 150 years
fosk 6y ago
San Francisco also hosts radioactive waste close by, located at the Farallon Islands[1]. > From 1946 to 1970, the sea around the Farallones was used as a nuclear dumping site for radioactive waste under the authority of the Atomic Energy Commission at a site known as the Farallon Island Nuclear Waste Dump. Most of the dumping took place before 1960, and all dumping of radioactive wastes by the United States was terminated in 1970. By then, 47,500 containers (55-gallon steel drums) had been dumped in the vicinity, with a total estimated radioactive activity of 14,500 Ci. The materials dumped were mostly laboratory materials containing traces of contamination. Much of the radioactivity had decayed by 1980. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farallon_Islands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farallon_Islands
- cclark00 6y ago
  And the "USS Pandemonium" at Treasure Island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. A ship they built on land that they could apply radioactive contamination then teach sailors how to clean it up. Then dump it all out into the bay. Contaminated soil is still being discovered as recently as 2013 on Treasure Island where they have built housing. More here: https://www.businessinsider.com/radioactive-contamination-on-san-franciscos-treasure-island-a-tale-of-us-government-obfuscation-and-willful-ignorance-2012-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/radioactive-contamination-on...
giardini 6y ago
paywall. Is there a free link?
boringg 6y ago
This is pretty insane to me that we were just letting ddt get dumped in the deep (and shallow) ocean. Outside of the environmental impacts - I feel like there’s a parallel to the push in geoengineering and carbon capture and storage in the future in that it’s the ‘let’s just do this now and hope there aren’t bad repercussions in the future’ thought process.
xyst 6y ago
Speaking generally, can nanotechnology be applied to superfund site cleanups? As it currently stands, our tools for cleaning up these chemicals are extremely crude. Why can't we develop a nanobot that is able to detect the chemical in the soil or ocean and then break down or decompose that molecule?
- webmaven 6y ago
  > Speaking generally, can nanotechnology be applied to superfund site cleanups? As it currently stands, our tools for cleaning up these chemicals are extremely crude. > Why can't we develop a nanobot that is able to detect the chemical in the soil or ocean and then break down or decompose that molecule? We could, in theory, but a faster approach (that is already being used) is harnessing existing organisms. Bioremediation is an approach being actively researched, and recent advances in genetic engineering (eg. CRISPR) ought to help a lot. A search for "DDT bioremediation" will show you the research on this that is being done (not a huge amount, but progress is being made). There are probably some opportunities for B2G startups in this area.
ornornor 6y ago
It’s hard to fathom how much we’ve fucked up our environment and ourselves overall. I think we polluted ourselves into a corner and are headed for extinction (and taking most of life on earth with us) It’s sad to think about but it’s hard to argue we don’t deserve it after all.
ElijahLynn 6y ago
It's amazing how little this article names and shames. If there is no personal accountability then some people won't learn their lesson. I saw one only one name of the people responsible for this, Samuel Rotrosen, Montrose's president at the time. And Samuel Rotrosen was only mentioned once, buried deep down many paragraphs in. So much so that in all the comments here, I am the only one to mention the name of the person who seems ultimately responsible for this, Samuel Rotrosen.
mleonhard 6y ago
I hope the EPA does a survey to find and count the barrels and find out how many of them still contain waste. Then vacuum them all up and process the waste carefully.
silexia 6y ago
I swam so much in Santa Monica and never even knew about the dumping that the EPA had won a lawsuit for... Horrifying.

341 points by rblion 6y ago

It's amazing how little some people have cared, this was not that they didn't know, they certainly knew, otherwise, it'd not have resorted to hiding the stuff by dumping it into the sea.. It'd not be unreasonable to hunt down those responsible, and make them pay for cleaning it up. Sure, they're probably dead by now, but they probably left a lot of money. I don't think it's even relevant that "it was not illegal at the time", they knew the stuff was toxic, and they chose to release it into the oceans, just because no one had explicitly made a law banning them from doing so.. Common sense should be the first law.

relix 6y ago
One of the first paragraphs of the article: at the time it was considered dumping the barrels in the deep ocean was sufficient because the vast amount of water would dilute the chemical. The shortcut they took was that they did not go that far into the ocean but instead kept much closer to shore and dumped the barrels there, as well as punctured them when they floated. The discovery that's lamented is the "shortcut dumping ground". This does not fit with your jumped-to conclusions.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
sokoloff 6y ago
He didn’t, but suppose my grandfather legally (or even semi-legally) disposed of some DDT and left my father some money. My father later me some money. What’s the legal process to claw some of that money back to pay for the cleanup? Do you or the state have standing to sue me for something I never did, knew nothing about, and can’t reasonably answer to any specifics about?
- meed2000 6y ago
  Suing you to the extent of having to pay back whatever your father passed on to you, at least what's left of it would be reasonable, don't you think?
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    No, I do not. If my grandfather left my father $X, my father left me $Y, at the very most the maximum would have to be the lesser of $X and $Y, decremented by the full cost of answering the lawsuit. This is problematic from a variety of practical angles, though, not just mathematical ones. It seems like something the forensic accounting lobby would salivate over. Should I be forced to defend a lawsuit because my great^6 grandfather owned slaves? (As far as I know, none did.) That’s more abhorrent than legally dumping chemicals that today’s common sense says should have been done differently.
    - dubcanada 6y ago
      But if you grandfather lost all of $X, your father would not have any of $Y (based entirely on $X being an amount they got from business dealings and $Y being a smaller amount which came from $X).
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        That strikes me as non-sensical. My father had his own earning, creating, and saving abilities.
        pessimizer 6y ago
        Subtract it from what he would have earned if he had dumped the cash into an index fund, and we may find that his earning, creating and saving abilities were negative. His only profitable skill may have been having a father who dealt in slaves.
    - dathinab 6y ago
macspoofing 6y ago
The problem with your approach, besides the immorality of arbitrary post-hoc rationalization for punishment, is that it is not pragmatic. What's done is done, and you need people to get behind making it better. If you come out and push a policy that in part entails rooting and punishing those responsible (or even descendent of those responsible), you'll have people come out against it just for that reason and the environment will suffer. I would be one of those people, because I would never give that power to the kinds of people who would argue for the arbitrary execution of collective punishments on people today. If given the choice to fix environment/punish wrongdoers or do nothing, I would go with 'do nothing'. It's why 'The Green New Deal' is so terrible because instead of focusing on pragmatic solutions we can all get behind, it suffers from scope creep of socialist and progressive policies that have little to nothing to do with climate change and environment - and therefore I'd rather have none of it. To circle back on collective punishment - there's a reason why the North, after winning the civil war, has largely chose not to collectively punish the South - in much the same way that other regions which suffered through terrible civil wars where terrible crimes were committed, frequently choose to replace punishment of many of those responsible with something like reconciliation committees, where symbolic gestures are accepted in lieu of prison or capital punishment.
- Hokusai 6y ago
  > post-hoc punishment post-hoc punishment is the only reasonable punishment. The alternative it to punish people before they commit a crime, and that seems immoral at best. > push a policy My guess, it was already illegal to poison the environment. They just got caught now. > those responsible with something like reconciliation committees ... symbolic gestures are accepted in lieu of prison or capital punishment. Corporations are not people. You can punish a corporation without any of that considerations.
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    >post-hoc punishment is the only reasonable punishment. Maybe a little charitable interpretation is warranted? I clearly meant, post hoc rationalization for the punishment. Typically you punish when AN EXISTING law is broken. In this case, OP is arguing for new punishment based on new laws that were broken in the past. >My guess, it was already illegal to poison the environment No. The devil is in the definition of 'poison the environment'. We have coal plants that 'poison the environment'. We have solar panels, that through manufacturing, maintenance and decommissioning, 'poison the environment'. >Corporations are not people. You can punish a corporation without any of that considerations. Who owns corporations? This "corporations are not people" is such a cliché. All the rights that corporations have stem from the rights of the owners. Corporations have rights, because the owners have rights. And who says the corporations are solely responsible? An unincorporated contractor may be responsible as well.
tsdlts 6y ago
"I don't think it's even relevant that it was not legal at the time". Imagine setting the precedent that the government can unilaterally decide to steal your property based on something your great grandfather did which wasn't even a crime. Do you not see how such a power might be abused in future when you can retroactively punish people for laws where the ink has yet to dry and that they never even committed?
- phkahler 6y ago
  Ex post facto laws are forbidden by the US constitution.
  - btilly 6y ago
    Only for criminal laws. Ex post facto laws allowing civil suits to be brought would be a different matter.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
  That's a good point. Where's the line between knowingingly circumventing the spirit of the law by following the letter. For example Teflon has been replaced with chemically similar compounds that just aren't Teflon. It'll take decades for the studies to come in, in the mean time every human is being exposed to these chemicals in significant amounts. Then we have bpa, Neonicotinoids and other pesticides. We have cases where companies knowingly sell talc contaminated with asbestos for decades. We know these products kill people, we now the companies that make thenknow they are killing people and yet we can't claw back decades of fraudulently acquired profits and revenues? Imo, we should treat these behaviors like Nazis where everything they touched gets seized, even decades later. If that ruins some lives, well, whose worse off? The injured class or the child who inherited blood money?
  - tsdlts 6y ago
    Isn't this a regulation failure though? The fact that these chemicals who we don't know the full effects of are let to market is the problem. Preventative measures make more sense than criminalizing things only when we find out there's a problem. Also, what if the company has been acquired since then, is it still on the hook? What if they've since switched markets entirely? What if the company disbanded and the founders created a new company in the same market? There's no clean way to deal out punishment in a legally unambiguous or overreaching way.
bsenftner 6y ago
> Common sense should be the first law. That won't work, we have an entire political party in the United States hell bent on making sure people have no common sense. The GOP are a selfish cancer on civilization.
relativitypro 6y ago
1. This dumping was litigated in the 60s and happened before this 2. You can’t predict the future 3. This is the efficient market at work, don’t solve any problem until it becomes a social, political or environmental reality you can’t legalese your way around.
billyhoffman 6y ago
> I don't think it's even relevant that "it was not illegal at the time" The idea that a government can make something illegal and retroactively punish previous offenders is so colossally bad that in the United States the Founding Fathers wrote a prohibition against it into the Constitution. It's not an amendment, such as the right to free speech. They wrote it into Article 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law.
- mattmanser 6y ago
  It's nowhere near as clear cut as you make it out. There are even plenty of examples in the page you link of justifiable ex post facto laws. For example war crimes. To be honest, because of the devastating long term effects of environmental pollution, and the deaths it has caused, I would quite happily argue that laws applying to it could be ex post facto. Crimes against future generations. I remember covering this in my philosophy degree and you can argue about it for hours. The example I remember was Nazi collaborators who reported on Jews or resistance fighters or even falsely accused neighbours. They got people killed, often maliciously, but what they did was perfectly legal at the time. Should they have gotten away with their complicity or should they have ex post facto laws brought against them? In the time of the US founders, the scale of damage a single human or company could conceivably do for profit was a lot less.
- gpm 6y ago
  It seems unlikely that this would be retroactive. It would probably fall under some pre existing statute like vandalism.
  - leptons 6y ago
    "Causing environmental catastrophe" seems like it should be covered by some kind of law in the last 70 or 80 years since DDT started production. They knew how toxic the substance was and how long-lived it was, there is no guessing game as to whether it was a bad idea, even at the time. It has more to do with tolerance of callousness and stupidity in previous decades than it has to do with there not being a specific law against dumping specifically DDT into the ocean.
vaccinator 6y ago
> Common sense should be the first law. That's how I thought it was when I was a kid... now I can only wish it was in some instances.
dahdum 6y ago
> It's amazing how little some people have cared, this was not that they didn't know, they certainly knew, otherwise, it'd not have resorted to hiding the stuff by dumping it into the sea. > Common sense should be the first law They weren't hiding anything, the bulk went to government designated dumping sites. Shortcuts were taken, but it was known and accepted that these were being dumped into the ocean. Common sense at the time was "dilution is the solution to pollution".
b0tzzzzzzman 6y ago
Adding the latimes.com to my do not click or read mental list. So tired of pop ups or full on blocks just to glance at an article. Yeah I could easily resolve it.. So could the LA Times. Firefox Focus shouldnt need to allow trackers/cookies ... Miss the old days when people posted direct archive links.
mywacaday 6y ago
The tobacco and sugar industry were/are no different. Makes you wonder what else will be in same bucket in 20 years. Anyone care to hazard a guess?

refurb 6y ago

I’d probably be more worried about the nerve gas and mustard gas munitions dumped into the ocean after WW2. Far more toxic.

Shivetya 6y ago
My go to article for that, I have posted this link[0] many times. Scary as it is what is worse this is only that which we know of and not was dumped by governments or agencies that did not want it known. Just look back at WW2 and the number of merchant ships[1] that were sunk! Then throw in all the warships that went down during both world wars. Of course we have quite a bit of radioactive material in the oceans as well[2][3] [0]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decaying-weapons-world-war-II-threaten-waters-worldwide-180961046/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decaying-weapo... [1] http://www.usmm.org/shipsunkdamaged.html http://www.usmm.org/shipsunkdamaged.html [2] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/stevens2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/stevens2/ [3] https://e360.yale.edu/features/radioactivity_in_the_ocean_diluted_but_far_from_harmless https://e360.yale.edu/features/radioactivity_in_the_ocean_di...
1propionyl 6y ago
I wouldn't. Neither mustard nor sarin gas is nearly as resilient to breakdown as DDT. They break down at a much faster rate and ought not to undergo such extreme bioaccumulation.
- fogihujy 6y ago
  Fishermen still end up with the stuff in their nets, 75 years after WWII ended and it's still quite dangerous. Sure, DDT may stay a problem further into the future, but WWII munitions are still a very current issue.
  - 1propionyl 6y ago
    Yes, of course. No disagreement there. But one leaking barrel of DDT will affect an ecosystem for far longer than one leaking barrel of Sarin, and do more damage where it hurts the ecosystem the most by accumulating as it creeps up the trophic pyramid.

iBotPeaches 6y ago

Well that was a sad article to read on a Monday morning. If this is what we've just scratched the surface on - I'm nervous to what we don't know in terms of ocean dumping.

refurb 6y ago
If that depresses you, don’t look up what they dumped in the North Sea after WW2.
- tsjq 6y ago
  Made me curious. And I searched. Found this one. Yikes ! https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decaying-weapons-world-war-II-threaten-waters-worldwide-180961046/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decaying-weapo...
pjc50 6y ago
Greenpeace did a lot of work in the 80s and 90s against the dumping of nuclear waste, including direct action against the ships doing the dumping. This led to the London Dumping Convention. More recently, see e.g. Trafigura https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-10735255 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-10735255 (and what they've tried to hide with libel lawsuits) The WW2 stuff is bad but seems now to be inert, although occasionally someone finds a phosphorous shell on a beach in Scotland. https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/a-dangerous-guide-to-beachcombing/3008056.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/a-dangerous-guide-to-bea... More seriously, there is the SS Richard Montgomery, not dumped but sank during the war, carrying a thousand tons of explosives ... right next to London. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery

obilgic 6y ago

great article, but whats up with putting things on top of each other? https://i.imgur.com/ZztDMIr.png https://i.imgur.com/ZztDMIr.png

ebina-chonk 6y ago
I think AdNauseam would solve this problem.

faitswulff 6y ago

> “We found actual photos of the workers at 2 in the morning dumping — not only dumping barrels off of the barges in the middle of the Santa Monica Basin,” he said, “but before they would dump the barrels, they would take a big ax or hatchet to them, and cut them open on purpose so they would sink.” Incredible.

1propionyl 6y ago
See? This is why we don't need environmental regulations. The market will regulate itself if externalities are properly priced in! (Just pay no mind to how those externalities might be systematically priced and how penalties might be retroactively enforced. If you do you're a freedom-hating socialist!)
- faitswulff 6y ago
  > A pilot experiment more than a decade ago to bury the DDT [at the Palos Verdes superfund site] under a thick cap of clean sand showed mixed results. Then sampling in 2009 suggested that most of the DDT had mysteriously vanished — prompting a burst of headlines and more internal paralysis. The longtime project manager unexpectedly retired, and many of the scientists who had dedicated decades of their careers to the chemical have also either retired or moved on. The fact that DDT outlasted the scientists' careers is another strike (among many) against untrammeled libertarian free market thinking.
  - 1propionyl 6y ago
    Ah, so the front fell off. In that case the DDT was just transported outside of the environment. There's nothing there, except water, and fish, and birds. (In case it isn't clear to anyone, this is heavy sarcasm and a reference to a well known satirical skit.)
    - mercer 6y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

SeriousM 6y ago

Asking not to use a private session is the same as a paywall. Why is it allowed to post such articles?

LittlePeter 6y ago

I was waiting for the DDT acronym to be explained, but no. IMHO no matter how obvious an acronym may be, it should be explained, something like "DDT (D... D... T...) is highly dangerous". Apparently: "Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly known as DDT, is a colorless, tasteless, and almost odorless crystalline chemical compound, an organochlorine." edit: added explanation

1propionyl 6y ago
Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane. DDT.
jameshart 6y ago
It’s in paragraph 12, about 1/7 of the way in, after the scene setting opening bit about the barrels. > The world today wrestles with microplastics, bisphenol A (BPA), per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and other toxics so unnatural they don’t seem to ever go away. But DDT — the all-but-indestructible compound dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, which first stunned and jolted the public into environmental action — persists as an unsolved and largely forgotten problem.
gattilorenz 6y ago
To be honest, DDT is like "IBM". It might mean "International Business Machines", but many people wouldn't immediately recognize it unless the acronym is used (while the opposite is true: if you know what the acronym stands for, you usually know the acronym as well). And I'm sure Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane wouldn't add much for most people that read a newspaper :)
- LittlePeter 6y ago
  Even from the context, it was not clear to me what DDT was. I suspected it was some chemical. I would have appreciated a sentence or two explaining why it is bad and what it does. What IBM is would typically be clear from the context: "IBM reported record loss in 2nd quarter of 2020".
  - 6y ago

wombatmobile 6y ago

I came to this story after several days immersed in reading the ancient history of peoples who migrated east across the Pacific 5,000 years ago to form the island nations that are dotted over thousands of square miles of ocean to the west of California. What strikes me as strange is that Californians, or Americans, don't see themselves as one nation of people with one overriding interest - to keep their ecosystem pure and habitable so their people can thrive and prosper. I know that's naive. In America individuals are free to pursue any activity that is permitted by law. Prosperity is measured in dollars, and breaches of the law require a lot of dollars to be exposed and rectified. The national purpose works differently to other countries, particularly smaller nations in which the people are more in contact with nature every day. Still, I can't help but wonder whether most Americans would be happier if things worked differently, and catastrophes like the DDT dump were able to be rectified in a unified national effort. I'm not sure why that doesn't happen, or what makes it so unlikely.

happy_path 6y ago

Wouldn't be possible to make controlled explosions to consume submerged hazardous materials, like DDT? I know it is a drastic solution, but would it make sense?

jimktrains2 6y ago
Only if the thing is chemically consumed, otherwise you just spread it around unchanged. I don't believe DDT would be consumed in any normal explosion.
- asdff 6y ago
  What is the solution then? Concrete case and hope it doesn't leak?

dan-robertson 6y ago

Wikipedia has the half life of DDT in soil from 22 days to 30 years. In a marine environment it is estimated to be 150 years.

basicplus2 6y ago
I didn't know Wikipedia had a half life..

ogurechny 6y ago

The lesson here is that big businesses will argue that their operations are correct not just out of neglect, but knowing perfectly well that they are not. Now let's look at what we have in IT today…

jdlyga 6y ago

Jake the Snake was also a DDT dumping ground. Dumping your ass with a DDT, you're welcome.

spodek 6y ago

This community is so quick to embrace new technologies and so dismissive of unintended side effects. We cringe at DDT dumps but loved it at the time. Do we not expect similar unintended side effects from other things this community endorses like fusion or seeding the atmosphere with reflecting materials? We do this to Earth and we think we'll do better on Mars?

Google234 6y ago
DDT saved 10s if millions of lives. Makes sense that people liked it

stanski 6y ago

It's easy to get outraged (as we should) when we hear about a developing country recklessly polluting the environment but it's important to remember that the West has been doing this on a very large scale for a very long time. Climbing onto this (somewhat) high horse hasn't been an overnight process.

WhompingWindows 6y ago
Developing or developed, basically every country engages in questionable environmental practices. The developed nations have the current edge, since many of their offenses occurred in the past and they are less accountable now...just like these DDT barrels.

EvanKnowles 6y ago

Apart from the awfulness of it all, anyone else get EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus vibes from the photos?

aaron695 6y ago

DDT is effectively harmless. You can eat it and be fine for a bet. In an ocean, even if you swapped these barrels for a real poison it doesn't matter. It dilutes to nothing. The insanity on HN about this, I hope clarifies their intelligence on everything. To go to these commentators for their view on say, Rust, is just as insane. And this isn't about stupidity, the banning of DDT was criminal, it killed many many people. Perhaps in the millions. But it was poor people. And this is why HN continues this attitude. It wasn't real people killed to them.

yeezul 6y ago
Did you even read the article?
NathanKP 6y ago
We know for a fact that DDT has a serious impact on wildlife. Humans aren't special. If something is causing tumors in wildlife as DDT did then it will cause increased cancer risk in humans as well. And studies have shown that DDT travels up the food chain to higher animals as they eat lower animals, gaining more and more concentration each time. Since humans are the ultimate apex predator that eats other stuff on this planet we need to be really careful about the chemicals we release into the environment, unless we want to end up poisoning ourselves. It's not complicated: creating and dumping large amounts of a long lived chemical that does not break down easily, and which causes increased cancer risk is a really bad idea.
- aaron695 6y ago
  > If something is causing tumors in wildlife as DDT did No it didn't. But we are a post fact world I guess? It did cause eggshells to thin in some birds. But chocolate kills dogs.

x87678r 6y ago

While this dumping is horrific you also have to understand how beneficial DDT was: > Between 1945 and 1965, DDT saved millions-even tens of millions-of lives around the world, perhaps more than any other man-made drug or chemical before or since. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/07/02/the-mosquito-killer https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/07/02/the-mosquito-k...

WhompingWindows 6y ago
Couldn't bug nets have achieved the same effect without poisoning the biosphere?
- stonogo 6y ago
  Not even almost. I've never gone to sleep in a netted bed without waking up with mosquitos on the inside of it, and I don't know anyone who has.
- staplers 6y ago
  Those nets would be made of plastic and likely end up in the ocean at some point. If we mass-distributed them, even worse.
- carapace 6y ago
  Yes, people distribute mosquito nets to reduce incidence of malaria. It's a thing. > The most effective means of preventing malaria is sleeping under a mosquito net, specifically a long-lasting insecticide treated net (LLIN). ~ https://www.againstmalaria.com/WhyNets.aspx https://www.againstmalaria.com/WhyNets.aspx
relativitypro 6y ago
1. Saving human lives may not be the best metric (given that even this metric is evolving in time, and I claim unknowable) 2. The green revolution benefits were several orders more significant, and will be seen as the spark that enabled climate change. Responsibly using technology is our biggest task.

dajomu 6y ago

The half-life of DDT in an aquatic environment is about 150 years

fosk 6y ago

San Francisco also hosts radioactive waste close by, located at the Farallon Islands[1]. > From 1946 to 1970, the sea around the Farallones was used as a nuclear dumping site for radioactive waste under the authority of the Atomic Energy Commission at a site known as the Farallon Island Nuclear Waste Dump. Most of the dumping took place before 1960, and all dumping of radioactive wastes by the United States was terminated in 1970. By then, 47,500 containers (55-gallon steel drums) had been dumped in the vicinity, with a total estimated radioactive activity of 14,500 Ci. The materials dumped were mostly laboratory materials containing traces of contamination. Much of the radioactivity had decayed by 1980. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farallon_Islands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farallon_Islands

cclark00 6y ago
And the "USS Pandemonium" at Treasure Island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. A ship they built on land that they could apply radioactive contamination then teach sailors how to clean it up. Then dump it all out into the bay. Contaminated soil is still being discovered as recently as 2013 on Treasure Island where they have built housing. More here: https://www.businessinsider.com/radioactive-contamination-on-san-franciscos-treasure-island-a-tale-of-us-government-obfuscation-and-willful-ignorance-2012-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/radioactive-contamination-on...

giardini 6y ago

paywall. Is there a free link?

boringg 6y ago

This is pretty insane to me that we were just letting ddt get dumped in the deep (and shallow) ocean. Outside of the environmental impacts - I feel like there’s a parallel to the push in geoengineering and carbon capture and storage in the future in that it’s the ‘let’s just do this now and hope there aren’t bad repercussions in the future’ thought process.

xyst 6y ago

Speaking generally, can nanotechnology be applied to superfund site cleanups? As it currently stands, our tools for cleaning up these chemicals are extremely crude. Why can't we develop a nanobot that is able to detect the chemical in the soil or ocean and then break down or decompose that molecule?

webmaven 6y ago
> Speaking generally, can nanotechnology be applied to superfund site cleanups? As it currently stands, our tools for cleaning up these chemicals are extremely crude. > Why can't we develop a nanobot that is able to detect the chemical in the soil or ocean and then break down or decompose that molecule? We could, in theory, but a faster approach (that is already being used) is harnessing existing organisms. Bioremediation is an approach being actively researched, and recent advances in genetic engineering (eg. CRISPR) ought to help a lot. A search for "DDT bioremediation" will show you the research on this that is being done (not a huge amount, but progress is being made). There are probably some opportunities for B2G startups in this area.

ornornor 6y ago

It’s hard to fathom how much we’ve fucked up our environment and ourselves overall. I think we polluted ourselves into a corner and are headed for extinction (and taking most of life on earth with us) It’s sad to think about but it’s hard to argue we don’t deserve it after all.

ElijahLynn 6y ago

It's amazing how little this article names and shames. If there is no personal accountability then some people won't learn their lesson. I saw one only one name of the people responsible for this, Samuel Rotrosen, Montrose's president at the time. And Samuel Rotrosen was only mentioned once, buried deep down many paragraphs in. So much so that in all the comments here, I am the only one to mention the name of the person who seems ultimately responsible for this, Samuel Rotrosen.

mleonhard 6y ago

I hope the EPA does a survey to find and count the barrels and find out how many of them still contain waste. Then vacuum them all up and process the waste carefully.

silexia 6y ago

I swam so much in Santa Monica and never even knew about the dumping that the EPA had won a lawsuit for... Horrifying.