It was a shocking find off the Southern California coastline: A UC Santa Barbara researcher found new evidence of forgotten wide scale toxic waste dumping in the ocean between the Port of Los Angeles and Catalina.
Now, a new documentary making its West Coast premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival takes an in-depth look at the situation.
In 2011, Dr. David Valentine was working on another underwater research project when his team stumbled across deteriorating barrels of toxic waste on the ocean sea floor off Catalina. It led to more expeditions, and even bigger questions.
"We don't really know how much is out there. We don't know exactly where it all is. We don't know how much is being degraded away, buried, or reintroduced into organisms," said Valentine.
Valentine says they later determined the barrels weren’t the worst of the problem. They believe the cancer causing chemical DDT was openly dumped in the ocean. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, it was actually legal with permits to dump wastes off the coast.
"What really got us into it, the dramatic vision of the barrel...it's not filled with DDT waste. The DDT waste was probably there on the sea floor, dumped in bulk at the time the barrels were dumped," said Valentine. "They seem to be different waste streams. They just bulk dumped the DDT waste, but we also found that they were taking things like low level radioactive waste and dumping that as well in these barrels."
The researcher took his alarming preliminary findings to federal officials, but got nowhere. He went to Washington D.C. and met with congressional staff members and officials with agencies, and showed them evidence he had collected. But Valentine said no one was willing to support efforts to go out again to do more comprehensive research.
Then, he connected with Los Angeles Times reporter Rosanna Xia. She focuses on coastal and ocean related environmental stories. Xia did an award winning series of stories which also finally opened the door to some funding to try to help assess the extent of the dumping. It also led to the documentary.
"Piecing this story together has been begging to be told more visually," said Xia. "I met these amazing filmmakers, Daniel Straub, and his brother Austin, and they really just sold me on this vision for being able to tell this story, still journalistically precisely, and also honoring the science, and finding a way to help immerse the audience in the story in a completely more profound way."
The journalist said the new documentary expands on the newspaper’s coverage. She hopes using the medium of movies will help educate more people about the still mostly overlooked crisis.
"The scope of the problem is so massive, the thing I keep hearing from everyone working deeply and intimately day to day on this issue is you can't really even start to talk about solutions until you understand how big the problem is, and what the scope is," said Xia The more we look, the more we find, now that we know to start looking."
Out Of Plain Sight was produced by the Los Angeles Times and Sypher Studios.
Valentine said there may be tens or hundreds of thousands of the more than half century old barrels of toxic waste materials on the ocean floor, including some with low level radioactive wastes. And there could be many square miles of DDT spread out on the ocean floor. He said we still don’t know exactly what’s there, but his focus now is trying to answer those questions.
Out of Plain Sight will make its West Coast premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival at 6 p.m. February 7. There’s a second festival screening at noon February 9 which features a question and answer panel featuring Shaw, Valentine, and other researchers in the film.
