Unalaska, AK – City officials say that PCB contamination at Unalaska's powerhouse site is worse than initially thought, and that cleaning it up could run $1 million over budget.

The cleanup of the site began this summer, to make way for the slated expansion of the powerhouse. Public Utilities Director Dan Winters said work crews have turned up 3,100 cubic yards of soil with less than 50 parts per million of PCBs, where they had anticipated about 1,200 cubic yards. And there's a whopping 1,600 cubic yards of soil with PCB concentrations over 50 parts per million--considerably more than the 90 cubic yards they had originally estimated.

"It was quite a bit more than we expected," Winters said.

The city council is considering a $600,000 budget amendment to cover the additional costs of the project for now. But the city says that ultimately the Army Corps of Engineers should foot the bill.

Both the city and the Army Corps believe the PCBs originated with the military's World War II-era transformers that were later collected on the site and at some point cracked open, leaking their contaminant-rich oil onto the ground. The question is when that happened.

City Manager Chris Hladick argued that the fact that the PCBs were found as deep in the soil as they were suggests that it was decades ago, when the Navy owned the site, and that the Department of Defense is responsible.

"When you start finding PCBs at high concentrations at 12 feet in the soil, that means the soil's been turned over," he said. "It hasn't been from a surface spill. So we need to sit down with the corps and talk about this."

Corps staff involved in the project declined to record an interview for this story, but said they questioned Hladick's theory. The corps' project manager, Tom Reed, pointed out that the corps has spent millions of dollars cleaning up contaminated soil at other former military sites on Unalaska and Amaknak Islands where the military was responsible, but said this was not one of those cases. He said the transformer oil that contained the PCBs in the first place could have traveled that deep into the ground on its own.

The corps previously rejected responsibility for the powerhouse PCBs in a 2005 letter to the city, noting that the Environmental Protection Agency had found fault with the city's handling of the contaminants in 1991. That letter entertained the possibility that some contaminants might have spilled from a transformer during the Japanese bombing of Dutch Harbor in 1942, when the area around the powerhouse came under fire. However, the letter stated, "if a release did occur due to the 1942 attack, it would have resulted solely as an act of war," meaning the corps is not financially responsible for it.

The less-contaminated soil is being stockpiled at a cell in the Unalaska landfill, while the more-contaminated material will be encased in concrete and buried near the powerhouse on Biorka Drive.