Cond Nast Traveler does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. These cookies do not store any personal information. On Nov. 20, 1980, an oil rig in Lake Peigneur was doing exploratory drilling when they punctured the salt dome below Jefferson Island. Early in the morning on November 21, 1980, a dozen Texaco-hired workers abandoned their oil-drilling rig hastily in the middle of a lake. If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as: How the Loch Ness Monster Myth Got Its Start. Even more ominously, the platform began to tilt. The crew of the oil rig attempted to get it started again, to no avail, and soon they started to hear strange popping sounds from down belowsomething had gone very, very wrong. The question today was whether the entire island might collapse into the earth. Further, three dogs died in the event. Something terrible was happening as they watched the 150-foot tall rig disappear into a ten-foot deep lake. Not a major problem normally, they worked to get it loose. The lake once more filled with water, except this time, it was salty. The in-depth story of the Lake Peigneur Drilling Accident: When The Earth Swallowed a Lake.November 20, 1980, is a new day at Lake Peigneur in Louisiana. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. The pull of the whirlpool was so strong that it reversed the flow of the 12-mile-long Delcambre Canal that drained the lake into the Gulf of Mexico. When we humans reshape our planet, we try to do it deliberately, in the pursuit of some grand economic or political goal. The 50 men in the mine and seven on the rig all escaped . The water entered the mine with so much force that it caused a geyser of compressed air, water, and salt to be launched 400 feet into the air out of the opening of the mine. The rig workers toiled to get it loose. All 55 employees in the mine at the time of the accident were able to escape thanks to well-planned and rehearsed evacuation drills, or through heroic efforts by co-workers. Barges caught in the quarter-mile wide whirlpool in Lake Peigneur. No one on the rig, or in the mine down below, had any idea what was about to happen. Use ctrl+ option to select multiple domains / properties. They had been probing for oil under the floor of Lake Peigneur when their drill suddenly seized up at about 1,230 feet below the muddy surface, and they were unable free it. The miners were not notified by an outside source of the potential catastrophe. After the breach of the salt mine under Lake Peigneur, a whirlpool formed. You might wonder if a dam was breached or if the Earth suddenly flipped on its axis, but thats not the case in this incident. 20 November 1980: The Lake Peigneur disaster On this day 34 years ago, blundering oilmen turned a ten-foot deep freshwater lake in Louisiana into a saltwater lake over a thousand feet deep.. The sudden draining of Lake Peigneur did not end with a dry lake bed. Over the course of the morning, the fresh lake water began dissolving the salt and enlarging the hole until water was literally flooding into the mine. The current reached 35 miles per hour and in the process, a temporary 130-150 foot waterfall was formed -- the tallest ever in Louisiana state history. As compensation for damages, Texaco ended up paying $45 million to the owners of the mine and other local businesses, including $12.8 million to the botanical garden and plant nursery, Live Oak Gardens. Additional root cause analysis resources: hbspt.cta._relativeUrls=true;hbspt.cta.load(2164270, '5bb65196-fe52-44c5-a9c5-e9858a4dc0bb', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); hbspt.cta._relativeUrls=true;hbspt.cta.load(2164270, 'aafef1d7-c8dc-425d-811e-3cac56e2b042', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); hbspt.cta._relativeUrls=true;hbspt.cta.load(2164270, '6ecb29fa-03ca-4ff8-ad63-953c91c15b06', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); The workers heard loud pops and then the drilling platform began to tilt. Previous assessments had raised concerns about the stability of the mined-out salt dome; it may well have been a disaster waiting to happen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur. Alarmed, the men scrambled to the shore. The Lake Peigneur: II. Rare Moments In Time Never To Be Forgotten, Belle Gunness: The Killer Known As Lady Bluebeard, The Best James Bond Movies From The '60s And '70s. Once you establish how and why and incident happens, then you can brainstorm possible solutions to reduce the risk of a similar incident from happening again. As all this water ran into the mine, it compressed the air in it. The vortex sucked down the drilling platform, ten barges, a tugboat, 65 acres of surrounding land, trees, homes and a botanical garden. The following video shows what 1 mistake c. The water level dropped so low, the rivers flowed backwards. The drilling companies eventually agreed to pay $45 million to the owners of the mine and other flooded local businesses. Want to know more interesting facts? It forever changed this area, the lake, and its ecosystem. It wasnt clear to the miners what had happened at the time, but from the evidence at hand, the theory is that the drilling crew miscalculated their location and instead of being several hundred feet from the salt mine, they had instead been directly over a portion of it and penetrated the salt dome. They did! It is no wonder that one witness at the time said that it was the end of the world.. After some harrowing moments on a very slow elevator which brought workers up from well up to 1,800 feet underground, all made it to safety -- albeit the last to get out were soaking wet. Whoopsadoodle. As explained by one Dr. Whitney J. Autin, salt moves upwards and it pierces through surrounding strata and this piercing produces faults and folds within the surrounding sediments producing an ideal mechanism to trap oil., As such, Texaco was doing some drilling in the lake. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. They had been probing the floor of Lake Peigneur in Louisiana when their drill suddenly seized up at about 1,230 feet below the murky surface. To learn more about the accident, theres a YouTube video here with more details. Lake Peigneur is a pleasant spot these days, surrounded by trees and frequented by the wildlife of Louisianas Gulf Coast. Although both systems use latitude and longitude coordinates, each system uses a different method to project the coordinates onto a map. When filled, Lake Peigneur was 200 feet deep, the deepest in the state. Within three days, a ten-foot-deep freshwater lake was turned into a 200 feet deep saltwater lake. Want to know more interesting facts? The mine began collapsing, widening the hole and forming a great whirlpool whose first victim was the oil rig. One such instance can be found in Lake Peigneur, Louisiana. Luckily, the miners had a well-practiced evacuation procedure and all escaped the mine without incident. Lake Peigneur Disaster: II.I. . This website uses cookies to improve your experience. The small town of Delcambre sat south of it by a canal of the same name which flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. Lake Peigneur Originally, this lake was a shallow freshwater lake about 10 foot deep covering 1,300 acres. Early in the morning on November 20, 1980, twelve men decided to abandon their oil drilling rig on the suspicion that it was beginning to collapse beneath them. The lake today. On the morning of November 20, 1980, the crew of the oil rig was probing the lake bed when they ran into a small problemtheir 14-inch drill bit had become stuck at a depth of about 1,230 feet. 112, No. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Som. Sign up for our newsletter. Not far from the nightclubs of Bourbon Street, this upscale spot is fun and fabulous. It is difficult to determine exactly what occurred, as all of the evidence was destroyed or washed away in the ensuing maelstrom. Next, the astounded drillers watched as a whirlpool slowly formed, soon reaching a quarter mile wide and centered over the site of the oil drilling. The No. The rig crew had been drilling a test well into deposits alongside a salt dome under Lake Peigneur. Around large underground salt domes, you can often find oil. A placid, roughly 1,000-acre lake near New Iberia, Peigneur was a haven for fishermen and a scenic backdrop to Rip Van Winkle Gardens, a 20-acre paradise of tropical plants developed by John Lyle . SHOCKING Truth About The Biggest Man-Made Sinkhole Disaster | Lake Peigneur Drilling Accident Disaster Reports 1.07K subscribers Subscribe 38 Share 4.1K views 2 months ago The in-depth. Today it is a brackish body of water, with a maximum depth of 200 feet (60 m) which makes it the deepest lake in the state. The water downflowing into the mine caverns displaced air which erupted as compressed air and then later as 400 foot geysers up through the mineshafts.[4]. In 1980, oil drillers at Lake Peigneur punched through the roof of a salt cavern and caused the entire lake to drain underground, swallowing up millions of dollars worth of equipment while transforming the landscape in an instant. It was home to a small flotilla of shrimping and fishing vessels. [4] So much water drained into those caverns that the flow of the Delcambre Canal that usually empties the lake into Vermilion Bay was reversed, making the canal a temporary inlet. Fortunately, no injuries or loss of human life were reported. Get your fix of fascinating trivia in our 5-minute newsletter. Three hours after the first signs of trouble, the three to four billion gallons of water that had made up the lake were almost all gone, having dropped into the mine below, leaving a gaping crater. "It looked like a tidal wave," he said. . On November 20, 1980, an oil rig floating on Lake Peigneur was in the process of drilling a well. The workers immediately evacuated. A new home and a greenhouse full of exotic plants were added to wash it down with pieces of the popular botanical garden. It took two days for the lake to refill this with brackish seawater. An hour and a half later, the men watched their $5 million, 150-foot-high derrick somehow vanish into a lake that had an average depth of less than three feet. On the morning of November 21, 1980, a Texaco oil rig team on Louisiana's Lake Peigneur noticed that their drill had seized up below the surface of the shallow lake. // ]]> Lake Peigneur in southern Louisiana was swallowed up by a salt mine in 1980 when an oil drilling rig inadvertently penetrated a chamber of the mine 1,300 feet below the surface. document.write(new Date().getFullYear()); Its calamitous history testifies to the chaos that one simple mistake can unleash. The catastrophe permanently shut down the mine. Did They Survive? Due to a miscalculation, the 14-inch drill bit entered the mine, starting a remarkable chain of events which at the time turned an almost 10 foot deep freshwater lake into a salt water lake with a deep hole. The Lake Peigneur Disaster. In 1980 Texaco was doing exploratory drilling for oil in Lake Peigneur, a shallow man-made lake near New Iberia, LA. Click here if you would like to learn more about the different coordinate projection systems.
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