A Georgia firm has been hired to clean up the PCB-contaminated soil at the Missouri Electric Works site on South Kingshighway.

The actual cleanup work is expected to cost $3 million to $3.5 million, far less than the $17 million that the Environmental Protection Agency had estimated.

Missouri Electric Works was a motor and transformer repair and sales business. It closed its doors six years agon, after the death of owner Richard Giles.

Cleanup work is slated to start next year and could be completed in 2000, EPA official Pauletta France-Isetts said Tuesday.

She said increased competition and experience in the environmental cleanup industry has helped lower the cost of cleanup projects.

Once the soil work is done, the EPA will turn its attention to the contaminated groundwater at the Missouri Electric Works site.

France-Isetts, EPA project manager, said the groundwater study could cost $2 million.

It is uncertain how long it would take to address the groundwater contamination problem.

France-Isetts said preliminary site work has uncovered large underground cavities that are full of mud. "They are actually like caves," she said.

Addressing the groundwater problem could prove costlier than cleaning up the soil, she said.

As to the soil cleanup, France-Isetts said equipment must be set up and tests run before the work can begin full blast.

The tests could be run in late spring or early summer, with the full cleanup effort likely to start by late summer or early fall, she said.

The work will be done by Williams Environmental Services Inc. of Stone Mountain. The company has experience in this type of work, France-Isetts said.

The contractor will use a thermal treatment system to cook the contaminated soil and break down the PCB molecules.

A Houston, Texas, company successfully tested a method of heating the soil on the 6.4-acre site last year.

France-Isetts said the EPA will schedule a public meeting in Cape Girardeau to outline the soil cleanup plans. The EPA's regional office in Kansas City is considering holding the meeting in February.

It would be an informal, open-house type session, with EPA officials, the contractor and others involved in the Superfund project on hand to answer questions.

The cleanup project will extend beyond the Missouri Electric Works site to adjacent properties where the contamination has spread, France-Isetts said.

The EPA first began investigating the polluted site 14 years ago after the Missouri Department of Natural Resources discovered that transformer oil had leaked out of some of the 55-gallon drums that were then stored on the property.

EPA investigators found polycholorinated biphenyls or PCBs in concentrations of 21,000 parts per million in the soil.

Eighty percent of the cleanup cost will be borne by so-called potential responsible parties -- cities and businesses that took electrical transformers to MEW for disposal, repair and storage.

The EPA will pay 20 percent of the cleanup cost.

Litigation delayed cleanup efforts in recent years. But a federal appeals court last December upheld the cleanup agreement worked out between the EPA, the state of Missouri, and 175 former customers of Missouri Electric Works.

Nearly 140 potential responsible parties combined have put between $4 million and $5 million into a trust to help fund the cleanup. Some of that money has been earmarked for groundwater cleanup.

The remaining 42 potential responsible parties are those who were the biggest customers of the former Missouri Electric Works. They are managing the project. They will pay part of the soil cleanup cost and future costs associated with efforts to clean up the groundwater.