BREMERTON — For the last seven years, Beverly Kincaid's view out her window has included two hulking cylindrical containers on a beach across the Port Washington Narrows. Like many of her neighbors, she'd like the debris, whatever it is, to go.

"All I know about it is that I am sick of looking across the water at it," Kincaid said. "It's an eyesore, first and foremost."

Kincaid may have to wait awhile. In spite of the environmental efforts to clean up area beaches and Puget Sound, the ballasts, at the end of the 1700 block of Pennsylvania Avenue and visible from Lions Park, have gone nowhere.

No one quite knows for sure where they came from.

Bill Sesko — a longtime engineer, inventor and collector — claimed ownership back in 1997 and said they could have been "submarine salvage pontoons." In a 1997 Kitsap County Superior Court filing where he was defending himself against accusations of filling his properties with junk, he contended they had "historical significance."

"Because they could have been the ones used to salvage the USS SQUALUS in 1939," he wrote.

The Squalus was a diesel-electric submarine that sank on May 23, 1939, killing 26 men. Another 33 were saved after the survivors prevented the entire sub from flooding. A rescue operation using a specially developed chamber got the others out.

Submarine salvage pontoons date back to 1915, when sailors used 32-foot-long cylinders with wooden sheathing, according to Mary Ryan, curator at the Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport. So it is possible that Sesko was right about the pontoons.

But he died in 2004, and they haven't moved since.

The property around them has been — and will continue to be — the site of environmental cleanup. In 1998, a 150-foot-long rotting Navy tanker called the Ked was towed to the property.

The vessel was ultimately taken away in 2005 in an emergency enforcement action by the state's Department of Natural Resources, which was worried the 130-ton vessel might break free of its moorings and crash into the nearby marina or Warren Avenue Bridge.

The de facto current owner of the ballasts — the Department of Natural Resources — says they were placed on state tidelands without DNR's permission. The Environmental Protection Agency's local staff that monitor the site are on furlough while the government is shut down. The city of Bremerton, meanwhile, lacks jurisdiction to take action.

"DNR is continuing to work with the EPA to determine the best method for removal," said Abby Barnes, a member of DNR's aquatics division.

"It would be nice if they were removed for the improved view, but it took years to get rid of the Ked," adds Janet Lunceford, the city's code enforcement officer. "And I think the pontoons are not a high priority in the world of derelict vessels."

The property on the bank above the pontoons is a Superfund site. The Bremerton Gas Works site was the former home of a manufactured gas plant starting in the 1920s. It was listed on the Superfund National Priorities List in 2012. Work there has included removing a pipe that released tar into the narrows and plugging a manhole. Contaminated sediments have also been removed, organic material added and warning signs about the site were posted, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Through the initial cleanup, the EPA left behind the pontoons, however, for fear they might have contaminated soils requiring remediation, according to Paul “Trip” McConkey, a nearby property owner.

In 2015, the 8,000-square-foot carcass of an old concrete batch plant operated by the McConkey family was removed from the property, further tidying things up.

But the pontoons remain. The only time Beverly Kincaid gets a break from their sight when looking out her window is when the fog rolls in.

"You see a peaceful shoreline and then you see these stupid things," she said. "And nobody seems really interested, or it would cost too much to do anything with them."

This story has been updated to include a statement from the Washington State Department of Natural Resources.