Mother Jones
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Virlie Langlinais was at her Louisiana home on Lake Peigneur when she saw the swirling vortex. “It was like watching a science fiction movie with tug boats and rigs and everything going on,” she recalls from the comfort of her friend’s porch some three decades later, a faint breeze licking off the water below. “Like watching a little ducky in a bathtub going down the drain.” Now she and her husband, Noicy, live in fear that it might happen again.
Lake Peigneur, the site of one of the state’s most spectacular industrial disasters in 1980, kept coming up in my conversations with residents of Bayou Corne, the Cajun community in south Louisiana that has been evacuated for more than a year due to a massive, mining-induced sinkhole that now spans 24 acres—and is still growing. Last week, the state filed suit against Texas Brine and Occidental Chemical Company for damages relating to the disaster. (Read my story on Bayou Corne, which appears in the September/October issue of Mother Jones, here.) So on a sticky Sunday morning in June, I crossed over the Atchafalaya spillway to see the place for myself.
In November 1980, in the process of generating revenue for (of all things) an environmental cleanup fund, a Texaco oil rig accidentally punctured the top of a salt mine situated beneath the lake. The water above emptied into the mine, creating a whirlpool that sucked 11 barges into the caverns below, turned the lake from freshwater to saline, and caused the Delcambre Canal to flow backwards. Three days later, 9 of the 11 barges “popped up like iron corks,” the Associated Press reported; the other 2 were never found. Miraculously, all 55 workers who were inside the mine at the time of the accident managed to escape.
See more here –
This Sinkhole Sucked Down 11 Barges Like They Were Rubber Duckies
