Unalaska, AK – The state Department of Environmental Quality is testing bays and harbors around Unalaska for oil contamination, more than a decade after they were first identified as polluted.

Iliuliuk Bay was listed as an impaired body of water on account of petroleum pollution in 1990, and Dutch Harbor followed suit in 1994. DEC Division of Water environmental program specialist Laura Eldred said that both bodies of water were listed because of oil sheens that appeared on the surface at the time, but the DEC hadn't done on-site testing prior to last week.

The waters around Unalaska have been a mess for years, on account of high traffic and the shapes of the bays and harbors, which don't allow the sea to naturally flush out the area as effectively as it does elsewhere. Conditions have improved in the past decade to the point where there isn't the visible oil contamination there was in the early '90s, but the DEC is just now getting hard data from the area.

Eldred said the information collected will serve a variety of purposes, from simply educating the local community to assessing the effectiveness of pollution controls the Environmental Protection Agency put in place in the '90s.