The Chinese chief engineer aboard a container ship that struck a bridge support in San Francisco Bay misjudged, miscommunicated or intentionally misled a Coast Guard team about the amount of fuel that leaked after the collision, a state expert told investigators.
The engineer's initial report, which drastically underestimated the spill, was compounded by language barriers between investigators and the Chinese crew, including the engineer; the inexperience of the first Coast Guard responders on the scene; and federal officials' reluctance to embrace the state expert's estimate, according to a report on the spill response released on Monday.
The disclosures shed new light on the genesis of the misinformation about the scale of the spill.
Nearly 11 hours passed between the first spill estimate of less than 2,000 liters and when the Coast Guard told California and local officials it was actually 219,547 liters, according to the report's timeline of the incident. Monday's report revised the actual amount spilled to 202,514 liters.
The ship sideswiped the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on Nov. 7, opening a gash in its hull and leaking heavy fuel in the worst oil spill in the bay in nearly two decades. Thousands of birds were killed and more than a dozen beaches closed.
The Coast Guard has repeatedly said delays in getting and sharing the accurate estimate did not hamper its response, but the new report says that is unknown.
"While it is not certain how much the early response would have changed knowing the true volume spilled, certainly it would have helped alert stakeholders in the San Francisco Bay area [to] realize this was going to be a large-scale response," the report states.
The pilot of the Cosco Busan, Captain John Cota, told the Coast Guard shortly after the collision at 8:30am that he guessed 1,514 liters had spilled. The ship's unidentified chief engineer estimated the spill at 553 liters.
By 4pm, a state oil spill prevention specialist, Roy Mathur of the Department of Fish and Game, calculated it at 219,547 liters shortly after boarding the freighter. It took him 20 minutes to calculate the figure using a formula.
He was incredulous that the chief engineer would not know how to do the same calculation.
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