Report: Ship Gave Bad Info on Spill Size
Scott Lindlaw
Associated Press
01/29/2008
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The 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 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 several hundred gallons and when the Coast Guard told California and local officials it was actually about 58,000 gallons, according to the report's timeline of the incident. Monday's report revised the actual amount spilled to about 53,500.
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 realize this was going to be a large-scale response," the report states.
The pilot of the Cosco Busan, Capt. John Cota, told the Coast Guard shortly after the collision at 8:30 a.m. that he guessed about 400 gallons had spilled. The ship's unidentified chief engineer estimated the spill at about 146 gallons.
By 4 p.m., a state oil spill prevention specialist, Roy Mathur of the Department of Fish and Game, calculated it at 58,000 shortly after boarding the freighter. In about 20 minutes, he used a formula to reach his conclusion.
He was incredulous that the chief engineer would not know how to do the same.
Mathur, who had served as a chief engineer on large vessels, "believed that every competent chief engineer could perform the same calculation to come up with the 58,000 gallons," the report stated. He "felt that the chief engineer knew the calculation before the first (Coast Guard pollution investigator) team arrival."
Another factor that slowed the process was that the "federal on-scene coordinator," a Coast Guard captain, was reluctant to accept the state's estimate "without scrutiny and validation," the report found.
The report made only brief mention of Mathur's observations, with no elaboration about the chief engineer's reasons for misreporting the spill's size.
Steve Edinger, assistant chief of the California Department of Fish and Game, said he could not make Mathur available for an interview Monday.
Linda Sheehan, a member of the panel conducting the response investigation, said she did not recall Mathur's observations coming up in the group's meetings. But she called his characterizations in the report "very interesting."
The head of the investigative panel, retired Rear Adm. Carlton Moore of the Coast Guard Reserve, declined to comment on Mathur's observations.
The report did find that a lack of experience by Coast Guard and other responders contributed to "their failure to accurately quantify the lost fuel." The report pointed to a decline in spills as one reason why few personnel have experience in such situations, and recommended enhanced training.
