The Environmental Protection Agency has fined two ship brokers more than $500,000 for allegedly exporting for scrap a PCB-contaminated ocean liner that had cruised Hawai'i waters for more than two decades in the 1980s and 1990s.

The MV Oceanic, formerly known as the SS Independence, was not cleaned of polychlorinated bi-phenyls, or PCBs — as required by law — when it was shipped overseas last year to be scrapped, the EPA said.

Maryland-based Global Shipping LLC and an affiliate, Global Marketing Systems Inc., agreed to pay $518,000 in fines, but neither admitted nor denied the claims in an administrative consent agreement with the EPA's regional office in San Francisco.

Global Shipping bought the Oceanic from Norwegian Cruise Lines in 2007 but didn't tell the EPA it intended to export the ship for disposal, the EPA said.

The vessel and a tugboat left San Francisco in February 2008 for Singapore, according to documents Global Shipping filed with the Department of Homeland Security describing the ship as "scrap."

The vessel was built in 1949 in Massachusetts. It was moved to Hawai'i in 1980, where it sailed weekly interisland cruises until American Hawaii Cruises declared bankruptcy in late 2001.