Suchergebnisse

Prior to the 1960s, state governments retained primary responsibility for the regulation of water pollution. State officials emphasized voluntarism and close, informal cooperation between regulators and representatives from the major industrial and municipal sources of pollution. During the 1960s and early 1970s, growing dissatisfaction with state pollution control performance in Congress and at the local level acted as the driving force behind the gradual federal preemption of state authority. In the Lake Erie Basin, local advocates of tougher and more effective water pollution regulation looked to the federal government for relief and made common cause with sympathetic members of Congress.

In this article, we examine the decisions made by corporate executives and government officials that led to the discharge with minimal treatment of hundreds of metric tons of dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) waste into the Pacific Ocean over several decades. After World War II, Montrose Chemical Corporation of California's Los Angeles plant began making the new wonder pesticide, and Montrose executives worked with local officials to develop a waste disposal system that funneled the plant's process wastes into the county sewer system and ultimately into the ocean. Faced with increasing scientific concern about pesticides and a changed political climate in the 1960s, Montrose vigorously defended DDT and relied increasingly on exports to remain profitable. Years after the plant closed, a federal suit forced Montrose and related companies to pay the costs of environmental cleanup.