In Los Angeles yesterday, the Environmental Protection Agency had its first public hearing to discuss the capping of a gigantic deposit of the banned pesticide DDT on the ocean floor off the coast of Southern California. Remember, DDT was banned four decades ago, so this deposit’s been sitting there quite some time, reports the Associated Press (via Yahoo! News).

The estimated $36 million proposal by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calls for a cover of sand and silt to be placed over the most contaminated part of the estimated 17-square-mile area declared a Superfund site in 1996.

The cap won’t clean the site, but it could reduce the health risks for people who eat fish caught off the Palos Verdes coast, said Mark Gold, executive director of the watchdog group Heal the Bay.

The “new cap would be 18 inches thick and about 300 acres wide,” which would hypothetically be enough to at least stop the chemical from seeping elsewhere in the ocean. While this is definitely a good thing, I think the takeaway lesson here is that when we use dangerous chemicals, they don’t just disappear after a first round of harming us. The hazards are long-term, and affect us in ways we sometimes don’t anticipate. Who would have thought and agricultural pesticide would end up being a hazard when you eat fish? Just means we have to be more than extremely careful, I think. And unfortunately, that’s a lot easier said than done.

photo credit: dantekgeek’s flickr photostream/Creative Commons