10 Disturbing History Facts They Don't Teach You In School
4. Lake Peigneur Disaster
Lake Peigneur was a small lake in southern Louisiana with a small canal to the Gulf of Mexico, but had little use for anything other than trout fishing.
Underneath this lake, was a huge active salt mine. These are often formed under similar conditions as oil reserves, something that Texaco wanted to get their hands on.
In late 1980s, the company was doing a drilling survey to see if oil was present and how much they could extract. However, they had failed to account for the location of the salt mine. All of a sudden, their drill punctured into the mine, causing water to rush in, dissolving away more salt and making the hole bigger, causing even more water to flood in, dissolving even more. Soon an unstoppable chain reaction occurred. The rapid rate at which this was happening caused all the drilling equipment to collapse into the lake, with all the workers narrowly escaping with their lives.
The force of the newly formed giant whirlpool constantly increased the size of the hole.
At the time, the mine was fully staffed with workers over 4.5 km underground, unaware of what had happened. Soon however, workers noticed a large amount of water dripping through the roof, giving them just enough time to evacuate.
Meanwhile the whirlpool had now sucked in surrounding areas of the lake, tearing out all the vegetation on the shore, leading to landslides. Many boats, including 11 large barges, were also sucked in. Eventually, the surrounding town began to collapse into the lake. Many houses and the town’s botanical gardens were obliterated.
64 acres of land had been sucked into the lake by this point and the canal began flowing the opposite direction to fill in the lake and created a waterfall.
Chaos ensued for a week until everything settled. The salt mine took months to reopen, but due to the damage, it finally closed down in 1986. Texaco payed the owner $32 million and $13 million to the botanical gardens.
Fortunately, no human was injured. For the animals that lived in the lake however, that is a different story.