Lake Peigneur
Thursday, 16th April 2009 by Alex Steinberger
Before 1980, Louisiana's Lake Peigneur was a 3 metre deep freshwater lake, but due to a highly unusual man-made disaster, today it is a 60 m deep saltwater lake.
On the morning of November 20th, 1980, a group of Texaco Fuel Company workers drilling the lake for oil inadvertently broke through the lake bed into the upper reaches of the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine below. The water began to pour rapidly into the cavern left by the mining process, and soon the expanding sinkhole had swallowed the entire lake, the drilling platform, and 11 barges1!
Barges being pulled into the sinkhole
The suction that this sinkhole created was so powerful that it actually managed to reverse the flow of the Delcambre canal, a 12-mile-long waterway leading to the Gulf of Mexico. Once the lake itself had emptied, the inflow from this canal created a 50 m waterfall, the largest ever recorded in the state of Louisiana2.
Miraculously, everyone in close proximity to the sinkhole as well as the 55 workers in the flooded mine were able to escape with their lives. 9 of the 11 barges even managed to "pop" back up to the surface once water pressure had equalised!
Though Texaco was never charged with negligence due to a complete lack of evidence3, the Diamond Salt Company still managed to walk away with $32 million in an out-of-court settlement. Needless to say, they never went back into the salt-mining business.
Thanks to Gerald Talley and Terry Foster. There's more info on Lake Peigneur at Wikipedia.
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Watch footage of the disaster on Youtube. ↩︎
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Temporary or otherwise. ↩︎
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No lake, no mine, no evidence! ↩︎
About the author
Alex Steinberger is a starving graduate student studying urban planning in Portland, Oregon. He will work for food.
Texaco employee 1: “Have you checked there arent any mines where we are drilling?” Texaco employee 2: “No i didnt bother – do you think we need to?” Texaco employee 1: “No – you are right. Whats the worse that could happen?”
Didn’t you already do this one, like a year or so ago?
I might be mistaken, but it seems quite familiar.
I’d say you might be thinking of that other lake that drained into a huge underground salt mine, but I’m fairly certain that this is a unique occurrence. 🙂
If you do happen to come across the post that you are thinking of, please let me know!
You’d think we might have covered this before, but no, this one is totally new for us!
We did cover the Sidoarjo Mud Flow back in 2007 though, which was also caused by an industrial accident:
https://www.googlesightseeing.com/2007/11/06/the-sidoarjo-mud-flow/
This is like the perfect crime! “We emptied a lake, your Honour? Which lake? We had a drilling platform there? Which drilling platform? Hey, are we missing a drilling platform?”
It reminds me of the story about ten years ago of the guy on an earth auger drilling in the foundations of a building site in the East end of London – all proceeding normally, then the drill suddenly advanced into a void, and a second later vibrated with a hell of a twang… Down below, the Central Line underground train driver which hit it had the fright of his life…
I remember reading about this incident in Reader’s Digest ages ago (my gran had a stack of those magazines and reading them was more interesting than talking to my family!) It was called “The Lake That Went Down The Plughole” or something like that, and I had totally forgotten about it up till now. Nice post!
Scroll South-South-East and you’ll see Avery Island, a salt dome where Tabasco Hot Sauce is made.