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SAN FRANCISCO (CBS 5 / AP / BCN) ― The chief engineer aboard a container ship that struck a bridge support in the San Francisco Bay misjudged, miscommunicated or intentionally misled a U.S. Coast Guard team about the amount of fuel that leaked after the collision, a state expert told a panel of 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 "areas of concern" involving spill response that was released Monday.

The report, dated Jan. 11, also cited a lack of planning for volunteers wanting to aid the cleanup, and the necessity for specific training for volunteers.

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, and said nearly 20,000 gallons were recovered.

According to the report, a majority of the oil discharge took place "as a sudden event involving seconds or minutes."

The panel's report, however, did not examine the cause of the 900-foot container ship's crash into a Bay Bridge tower in dense fog.

When the ship sideswiped the bridge on Nov. 7, it opened a gash in its hull -- 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 had repeatedly said that delays in getting and sharing the accurate estimate did not hamper its response, but the new report said 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 stated.

The pilot of the Cosco Busan, Capt. John Cota, described the crash, which burst three of the ship's portside tanks, as the vessel having "touched" the bridge, the report stated. 

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.

But by 4 p.m. that day, 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 calculation formula to reach his conclusion.

He was incredulous that the chief engineer would not know how to do the same.

Mathur, who had previously 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."

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 in a phone interview that he had spoken extensively with Mathur about his experience on board the ship Nov. 7.

Edinger said Mathur had gone no farther than the report in their conversations.

"He has not communicated to me whether it was incompetence or language or dishonesty, which quite frankly, it could be dishonesty, or a combination of all three," Edinger said.

Edinger said he could not make Mathur available for an interview Monday.

Linda Sheehan, a member of the panel that is conducting the investigation into the response, said she did not recall Mathur's observations coming up in the group's meetings. But she called Mathur's characterizations in the report "very interesting."

The question of how the inaccurate estimate first surfaced is one the investigators focused on intensely in their initial Incident Specific Preparedness Review, Sheehan said. They did not get to the bottom of it, she said.

The head of the investigative panel, retired Rear Adm. Carlton Moore of the Coast Guard Reserve, declined to comment on Mathur's observations.

The ISPR confined itself to the government's response to the spill, and investigators did not interview Cota, the ship's master or other crew members, Moore and others said at an afternoon news conference on Treasure Island.

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.

It was not until 8 p.m. when the Coast Guard told state and county officials in a conference call of the new 58,000-gallon estimate that Mathur had reached four hours earlier.

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 investigative panel, chaired by Moore, that worked on the report, also consisted of representatives from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, the California Office of Spill Prevention and Response, the
Pacific States/British Columbia Oil Spill Task Force, the California Coastkeeper Alliance, San Francisco Baykeeper, the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association and the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management.

The review panel's second, and final report, on response operations after the first two weeks, is expected in May. Meantime, a federal investigation by National Transportation Safety Board could conclude some time later this year.

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