If oil spills in the ocean and no one hears about it, is it still a disaster? A recent drilling rig failure that dumped an unknown amount of oil into China's Bohai Bay has made that question far from a philosophical riddle.

The spill has left no shortage of other riddles—such as, when did the leaks first occur? Why weren’t they reported to the public? And how big exactly was the resulting slick? News reports on the event are conflicting, sparse, and make it difficult to piece together what happened.

Two offshore leaks in the bay in northeastern China—one on June 4 and one on June 17—spewed an estimated 7,000 barrels of oil, covering an area of about 520 square miles. This is according to a July 12 account by Asia Times Online, which has provided the some of the most comprehensive coverage.

Although ConocoPhillips China, which owns the rig along with the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), reported the leaks to China’s State Oceanic Administration (SOA) in June, news of the spill was kept from the public until it was leaked on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, Sina Weibo, on June 21, according to Asia Times.

Even then, formal coverage of the event was slow to materialize, with a press conference and official statements from ConocoPhillips China not forthcoming until July 5. At that time, the slick was said to have been contained at about 1,500 barrels and 520 square miles (although a New York Times report on that day cites officials as saying the spread was 320 square miles).

On July 15, at least two news agencies, Agence France-Presse and ChannelNewsAsia, cited SOA estimates of the spill to be 1,650 square miles, or nearly six times the size of Singapore. An NTD News report that day, though, said the spill was 300 square miles. Since then, outlets such as the Guardian have used the original 520-square-mile estimate, while China Daily has stated official figures to be more than 2,600 square miles in July, but only 2,000 square miles in August.

What's particularly surprising is that most news outlets continued to report ConocoPhillips’ estimate of 1,500 barrels lost, even after learning that the platform was still leaking. In the last few days, as ConocoPhillips discovered more oily mud near the platform and missed a deadline to complete cleanup, that number has only been changed to a vague “more than” previous estimates of 1,500 barrels.

Trying to quantify the spill by barrels of oil lost or miles of ocean polluted is dicey under the best of circumstances, said Liesel Ritchie, assistant director for research at the Natural Hazards Center and longtime researcher of spills such as those from the Exxon Valdez, Selendang Ayu, and the BP Deepwater Horizon.

“The estimates used to measure these events are all over the place. There's nothing new about that,” she said. “For example, the official figure for the Exxon Valdez oil spill is 11 million gallons, yet some contend that almost 33 million gallons were spilled. What makes it really difficult is when you know nothing else about what happened—like in this current China situation.”

While the confusion surrounding the Bohai Bay spill is disturbing, it’s also business as usual in the thicket of Chinese public affairs. Technological disasters are often veiled, revealed long after the fact, or denied outright. The Bohai event recalls last year’s pipeline disaster in nearby Dalian, where the government reported less than a million gallons of gasoline spilled into the Yellow Sea. Scientists later estimated that number was about 18 million gallons, according to the Huffington Post.

From the attempted cover-up of a 2005 benzene spill to silencing citizen protests over schools that collapsed in the Sichuan Earthquake to last week’s media blackout regarding the safety of high speed rail trains, it’s clear that when the interests of the Chinese government or its state-owned businesses are at risk, some obfuscation will be involved.

What remains unclear is the extent to which these unpublicized spills and their damages—which are in no way limited to China, as the Guardian reports—will ever be known to the public.

The Bohai case has an interesting twist. While the government might want to protect state-owned CNOOC, it also has an interest in collecting compensation of up to $31 million per polluted hectare from U.S.-owned ConocoPhillips

One thing is certain. The oily coasts of Hebei and Liaoning Provinces, thousands of dead fish and scallops, and an angry Korea waiting for a response on cleanup efforts will make it harder for China to whitewash this instance of black sludge.