The morning of November 21, 1980, started as an unremarkable one on Lake Peigneur, Louisiana. Birds flew overhead, and barges dotted the surface. Fishermen were getting on with their day. A new addition, a drilling rig , was also at work on the lake. This wasn’t unusual for the oil-rich region – but what happened next was. As the drill made its way through the lake bed and into the rock beneath, it became stuck. While engineers tried to free it, the entire rig began to tilt. This called for an immediate evacuation, and the entire crew made it off the rig and onto their boat. As they moved to safety, the rig finally toppled over, and disappeared beneath the surface. The engineers could not believe their eyes. The lake was only about three metres deep at most, and their 30m-high rig was most definitely wider than that. How had the entire thing been swallowed up? What they didn’t realise at the time was that where the drill had become stuck, it had struck a salt mine beneath the lake. Salt had been excavated from its tunnels for around 60 years, meaning the empty space below the lake was much bigger than the volume of water above it. And while the drill itself was only 36cm wide, as water rushed through the hole, it quickly dissolved the surrounding salt. Suddenly, the hole was now an enormous drain, a 400m-wide swirling vortex. As the entire contents of the lake poured into the mine, it created a whirlpool above, dragging everything on the surface towards it – including boats. On one, three fishermen watched in horror as the lake disappeared before their eyes. Speaking at the time to the
Washington Post, Leonce Viator Jr described it as ‘the end of the world’. ‘I seen this wave coming by,’ he said. ‘I told [my nephew Timmy] “you’d better get out of here. The end of the world is coming”… but when I told him, we couldn’t go anywhere. ‘The wind was blowing, and everything seemed to go dry on the earth, and we were sitting on the mud.’ Illegal streamers could have IP addresses reveled in 'dodgy' Firestick warning World's fastest humanoid
Robot unveiled – but there's something odd about how it runs New bra device could help monitor breast
cancer tumours Covid-19 lab leak 'most likely' cause of the global pandemic, new study shows The whirlpool, which scoured the land around the lake and dragged trees and mud into its fearsome mouth, had soon emptied the entire lake into the salt mine below. But that wasn’t the end of the saga. The lake emptied into the Gulf of
Mexico via the Delcambre Canal. With its source gone, pulled into the depths, the canal reversed direction. Water started spilling back into the lake over a once submerged cliff, creating a huge waterfall. ‘It looked like a tidal wave,’ said Mr Viator Jr. ‘Some people say it was 20 feet high. I wouldn’t say it was that, [but] that water was roaring. I ain’t kidding you a bit.’ Water from the canal, and ultimately from the sea, flooded back into the lake, eventually refilling it. In a matter of hours, what was once a shallow freshwater lake became a 400m deep saltwater lake, changing its ecology forever. Incredibly, no lives were lost in the dramatic incident. Workers in the salt mine below were well briefed and escaped as water began pouring in. Those on boats as the drama unfolded also managed to escape. Eleven empty barges were sucked into the whirlpool, although reports suggest once the lake settled and refilled, nine popped back up. Around 65 hectares of land – or a little over 32
Football pitches – from nearby Jefferson Island was swallowed up by the lake. Texaco and the drilling contractor Wilson Brothers paid millions of dollars in compensation to local businesses and the salt mine owners for the incident. Ultimately, the entire disaster appeared due to a maths error, a triangulation calculation placing the drilling rig directly above a salt dome, rather than the potential
Oil field – although an investigation into the incident did not record an official cause. Now, more than 60 years on, the deep blue lake is again a peaceful space for water sports and fishing. But near its edge, a lone brick chimney can be seen breaching the surface. It belongs to one of the houses sucked into the whirlpool on that fateful day, an eerie reminder of one of the country’s most bizarre engineering fails. MORE :
UK UFO hotspot home to 70 years of strange sightings – and it’s not where you’d expect MORE : Man claims he was abducted by
aliens who made him perform ‘sexual experiments’ MORE : Inside the £3,500,000 ‘Doomsday-ready’ mansion that has its own weapons room Privacy Policy