Lake Peigneur: The Swirling Vortex of Doom

From Damn Interesting courtesy of Throw Away Your TV:

Shortly after they abandoned the $5 million Texaco drilling platform, the crew watched in amazement as the huge platform and derrick overturned, and disappeared into a lake that was supposed to be shallow. Soon the water around that position began to turn. It was slow at first, but it steadily accelerated until it became a fast-moving whirlpool a quarter of a mile in diameter, with its center directly over the drill site.

And

Clearly, the salt dome which contained the mine had been penetrated by the drill crew on the lake. Texaco, who had ordered the oil probe, was aware of the salt mine's presence and had planned accordingly; but somewhere a miscalculation had been made, which placed the drill site directly above one of the salt mine's 80-foot-high, 50-foot-wide upper shafts. As the freshwater poured in through the original 14-inch-wide hole, it quickly dissolved the salt away, making the hole grow bigger by the second.

And

After three hours, the lake was drained of its 3.5 billion gallons of water. The water from the canal, now flowing in from the Gulf of Mexico, formed a 150-foot waterfall into the crater where the lake had been, filling it with salty ocean water.

Click here for the rest, and here for some documentary footage.

Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Sort of a cascading disaster, with each successive event worse than the one before it. I'm kind of blown away by my never having heard of this, especially because it happened in my lifetime, back in 1980, only an hour and a half's drive away from Baton Rouge, where I live now, on the other side of the swamp outside of New Iberia.

Actually, it's somehow fitting that such an engineering disaster happened so close to the Louisiana swamp. While marshes and lowlands occur naturally in the southern half of the state, longtime and widespread use of levees has made swamps much more common than they would be otherwise. Meanwhile, decades of oil drilling has made the land drop even lower. Eventually, large sections of Louisiana will be covered by the Gulf of Mexico, and it's all due to human re-engineering of the environment.

The Lake Peigneur disaster is kind of a micro-version of what's happening all around here very slowly, everyday.


The Gulf of Mexico flowing upstream into the temporarily empty Lake Peigneur.

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