Higher-than-expected levels of the chemical chlordane in the soil beneath the former Henke Hall have delayed construction of the new Life Sciences building at the University of Hawaii at Manoa by nearly a year, and raised the cost of construction by nearly $4 million.

The university began work on the four-story building during the spring of 2017 to provide 45,000 square feet of new laboratory and office spaces for UH’s biology, microbiology and botany departments as well as its Pacific Biosciences Research Center.

The original cost of the Life Sciences project was $49.5 million, and construction was supposed to be finished by spring of this year, but the new completion date is February 2020, according to a UH spokesman.

Chlordane, a termite pesticide, was widely used in Hawaii until it was banned in 1988.

Jan Gouveia, vice president for administration at UH, said the university knew there were issues in the soil when construction started.

“We knew that there were going to be some environmental conditions that we needed to remediate,” she said during a Jan. 9 briefing for state lawmakers at the state Capitol. “We did testing, and it came at higher levels than we anticipated.”

UH processed a dozen change orders worth a total of about $4 million to deal with the contaminated soil. The university ordered its contractor to remove the contaminated soil and bury it under the parking lot at Kennedy Theater, a plan that was approved by the state Department of Health.

Gouveia explained in a report to UH’s Board of Regents that moving the contaminated soil was more cost-effective than burying it deeper under the Life Sciences building site.

The contractor was able to bury the soil 20 feet deep at Kennedy Theater but would have been required to dig a pit more than 40 feet deep to dispose of the soil beneath the Life Sciences site, according to the report. UH finished the soil remediation project last summer.

Dan Meisenzahl, UH spokesman, said the additional money for dealing with the contaminated soil might come from a specific budget request to the Legislature or could be drawn from a lump sum that is budgeted for maintenance and modernization of UH facilities.

The chlordane concentrations at the building site exceeded a state threshold known as the Environmental Action Level.

Eric Sadoyama, remedial project manager with the DOH’s Health Hazard Evaluation and Emergency Response Office, said the chlordane concentrations found at the Life Sciences building are typical of sites that were treated with termite pesticides.

Some samples taken from the soil under the Life Sciences building contained five times more chlordane than allowed by the EAL, but Sadoyama suggested that short-term exposure to the contaminated soil would not be a problem.

He said a chlordane concentration exceeding EAL levels does not mean there is an immediate concern to human health. It would take excessive and prolonged exposure to contaminated soil before noticing any health effects, he said.

At the federal threshold “you could have a little kid crawling around in that dirt every day for six years and, you know, sucking on his thumb, and it would not pose any problems,” he said.

As for the UH site, “I would not worry about it, unless the levels are so screaming high that you’re gonna have some sort of acute poisoning,” he said.

$60 million has been earmarked for the Life Sciences building so far, including $5 million for any future change orders. That $5 million has not yet been released by the state Department of Budget and Finance, according to Meisenzahl.

University officials have also spent more than $170,000 to make changes to the original design of the building to accommodate a “virtual lab” that they hope to add later. Meisenzahl said that the lab will be “an immersive virtual reality environment with ultrahigh-resolution display walls” but also said that the preparation of the space will allow for flexibility in case there are any design changes.