I set out to report on the toxins faced by LA’s subsistence pier fishermen. The reality was far more complex.

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.

DDT is what’s known as a “forever chemical.” It takes an extremely long time to degrade in the environment, and accumulates in the food chain as organisms consume smaller species exposed to it. 

At the time, scientists thought the ocean would be an ideal place for the chemical’s disposal, assuming it would essentially be diluted away. Instead, the insoluble compound settled onto the seabed and began working its way into the ecosystem. 

Today, hundreds of tons of Montrose’s DDT linger off the coast, and DDT and its related compounds continue to make their way into the Southern California food chain, poisoning wildlife. Sea lions here have abnormally high rates of cancer. California condors struggle to reproduce. And contaminated fish continue to threaten the health of coastal fishermen along a 50-mile stretch of oceanfront known as the “Red Zone.”

Bottom-feeding fish in this so-called Red Zone are the most exposed to the toxins and are considered unsafe to eat in any quantity. They’re also plentiful in the shallow waters around fishing piers and relatively easy to catch. Many fishermen do.  

My reporting project for the California Health Equity Fellowship planned on focusing on a subset of pier fishermen — those caught between the pollution of an 80-year-old chemical factory and a reality affecting more than 1 million Angelenos: food insecurity.

Pier fishermen are distinct from other types of anglers along the coast. They cast their lines from locations that require no license. Data collected by environmental nonprofit Heal the Bay show they often hail from neighborhoods that already bear some of the highest pollution burdens in California. And, according to research, nearly four out of five report they are fishing to supplement their diet.

Essentially, my reporting hypothesis was: On these piers, there were Angelenos who were eating contaminated fish out of necessity. I set out to find them. 

Over long days, I met folks who were unconcerned about the pollution and ate contaminated fish as a matter of course. I met others who were well aware of the pollution and steered clear. But nearly everyone told me the idea that people were surviving on fish from the pier didn’t match reality. 

I never found the fisherman I had imagined when I started — someone who consumed contaminated fish because they had no other choice. Instead, I encountered a wide cross-section of Southern Californians from all over the world, who fished for a variety of reasons. Some of them supplemented their diet with contaminated fish, either because they weren’t aware of the dangers or because they didn’t really believe the risk was all that serious. 

Perhaps predictably, I found this persistent, imperceptible danger challenging to bring down to human size. There is no epidemic of cancer because of the Montrose DDT that scientists can point to, no hotspots related to consumption of these fish. This does not mean the presence of DDT is not raising cancer risks for those who consume it, or that eating contaminated fish is fine for your health. Scientists know DDT is bad for you. But, in general, untangling its health impact from other risk factors can be hard, even in clinical settings. 

Which makes it tough to report on. 

But people are eating these fish. And they are full of toxins. The public health stakes are high. 

Keeping fishermen informed of the dangers — given the dizzying array of languages spoken on the piers, their constant use, and the streams of new fishermen each year — is a complicated and crucial endeavor.

So ultimately, with the sharp guidance of my senior fellow, I tried to zoom in on the systems the government had set in place to fix or mitigate the problem, and see how they were faring. The answer is what you might expect: dedicated folks working with somewhat limited resources in the face of an intractable problem. One Heal the Bay employee I spoke with said he’d seen generations of fishermen grow up on the docks and each new generation inherited the same problem, caused by a single factory, nearly a century before. 

In interviews with the EPA, I found they’ve spent two decades and millions of dollars trying to figure out an effective way to clean up the 17-square-mile Superfund site on the ocean floor, with little success. Their best option may be to just leave it alone.

Spending time on the docks with advocates and outreach workers, and diving deeper into their data, revealed how, despite the admirable, years-long effort of hard-working employees, some of those who needed the information most were not receiving it. 

In my piece, I tried to present a wide range of stories from the pier. The project also included a video element, and it was a pleasure to interview fishermen on camera and take their photographs. Spending time on the ocean with these anglers was a privilege. It gave me a new perspective on the California coastline.

Recently, scientists have discovered large, previously unexplored deposits of pure DDT in the deep ocean off the coast. Work continues to better understand how long we should expect the DDT to stick around, and just how bad its impact already has been. They are called “forever chemicals” for a reason — this issue won’t be going away anytime soon.