Every day along the piers and jetties that line the California coast from Malibu to Long Beach, fishermen cast their lines into what is essentially the most beautiful Superfund site in the world.
It’s the toxic legacy of the Montrose Chemical Corporation, a company once responsible for 40% of the annual global supply of the synthetic insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane — better known as DDT.
Montrose’s 13-acre factory was located on Normandie Avenue, just minutes from the Port of Los Angeles. Today, it’s abandoned except for a groundwater treatment facility established by the Environmental Protection Agency. But from 1947 to 1982, it manufactured the poisonous compound around the clock and, for the bulk of its existence, disposed its waste directly into the ocean…