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Old 06-08-2011, 12:35 PM  
mohel
 
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The Swirling Vortex of Doom Pt. 1

Lake Peigneur: The Swirling Vortex of Doom
Written by Alan Bellows on 06 September 2005


• Lake Peigneur: The Swirling Vortex of Doom • Damn Interesting

Quote:
Early in the morning on November 21, 1980, twelve men decided to abandon their oil drilling rig on the suspicion that it was beginning to collapse beneath them. 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. In their attempts to work the drill loose, which is normally fairly easy at that shallow depth, the men heard a series of loud pops, just before the rig tilted precariously towards the water.

At the time, Lake Peigneur was an unremarkable body of water near New Iberia, Louisiana. Though the freshwater lake covered 1,300 acres of land, it was only eleven feet deep. A small island there was home to a beautiful botanical park, oil wells dotted the landscape, and far beneath the lake were miles of tunnels for the Diamond Crystal salt mine.

Concluding that something had gone terribly wrong, the men on the rig cut the attached barges loose, scrambled off the rig, and moved to the shore about 300 yards away. 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.

As the whirlpool was forming on the surface, Junius Gaddison, an electrician working in the salt mines below, heard a loud, strange noise coming down the corridor. Soon he discovered the sound?s source, which was rushing downhill towards him: fuel drums banging together as they were carried along the shaft by a knee-deep stream of muddy water. He quickly called in the alarm, and the mine?s lights were flashed three times to signal its immediate evacuation. Many of the 50 miners working that morning, most as deep as 1,500 feet below the surface, saw the evacuation signal and began to run for the 1,300 foot level, where they could catch an elevator to the surface. However, when they reached the third level, they were blocked by deep water.

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. The water pouring into the mine also dissolved the huge salt pillars which supported the ceilings, and the shafts began to collapse.

As most of the miners headed for the surface, a maintenance foreman named Randy LaSalle drove around to the remote areas of the mine which hadn?t seen the evacuation signal, and warned the miners there to evacuate. The miners whose escape was slowed by water on the third level used mine carts and diesel powered vehicles to make their way up to the 1,300 foot level, where they each waited their turn to ride the slow, 8-person elevator to the surface as the mine below them filled with water. Although it seemed to take forever to get out, all 50 miners managed to escape with their lives.

Meanwhile, up on the surface, the tremendous sucking power of the whirlpool was causing violent destruction. It swallowed another nearby drilling platform whole, as well as a barge loading dock, 70 acres of soil from Jefferson Island, trucks, trees, structures, and a parking lot. The sucking force was so strong that it reversed the flow of a 12-mile-long canal which led out to the Gulf of Mexico, and dragged 11 barges from that canal into the swirling vortex, where they disappeared into the flooded mines below. It also overtook a manned tug on the canal, which struggled against the current for as long as possible before the crew had to leap off onto the canal bank and watch as the lake consumed their boat.

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. As the canal refilled the crater over the next two days, nine of the sunken barges popped back to the surface like corks, though the drilling rigs and tug were left entombed in the ruined salt mine.

Despite the enormous destruction of property, no human life was lost in this disaster, nor were there any serious injuries. Within two days, what had previously been an eleven-foot-deep freshwater body was replaced with a 1,300-foot-deep saltwater lake. The lake?s biology was changed drastically, and it became home to many species of plants and fish which had not been there previously.

Of course numerous lawsuits were filed, and they were subsequently settled out-of-court for many millions of dollars. The owners of the Crystal Diamond salt mine received a combined $45 million in damages from Texaco and the oil drilling company, and got out of the salt mining business for good.

No official blame for the miscalculation was ever decided, because all of the evidence was sucked down the drain, but the story described here is the generally accepted theory of what caused this massive disaster.
The Swirling Vortex of Doom Pt. 1-lake_peigneurr_01j.jpg 

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Old 06-08-2011, 01:12 PM  
mohel
 
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Keizer, OR
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The Swirling Vortex of Doom Pt. 2

Lake Peigneur (disappearing lake) History Channel footage

Quote:
Jefferson Island Salt Dome, Iberia Parish, Louisiana
Lawrence O'Donnell
AAPG Special Volumes
Volume SP 29: Gulf Coast Oil Fields, Pages 983 - 1025 (1936)
Jefferson Island, an elevation on a dry plain, is one of the Five Islands of Louisiana. The salt dome is under Jefferson Island and Lake Peigneur; the mound was produced by a salt spine, and the lake by subsidence due to solution of a flat table of salt. More than 250 salt exploration, oil exploration, and sulphur exploration and producing wells have been drilled on this dome. Salt was discovered in 1894 in the drilling of a water well, and sulphur was discovered in 1929 in an oil test. The salt is mined from a depth of 800 feet in the salt spine. The sulphur is mined from a deposit between two faults in the cap rock at depths ranging from 600 to approximately 900 feet. More than 2,225,000 long tons of salt have been produced by the Jefferson Island Salt Mining Company, and more than 500,000 long tons of sulphur have been produced by the Jefferson Lake Oil Company, Incorporated, since 1932. Several geophysical surveys have been made on Jefferson Island dome. As a result of the first survey, an electrical one, sulphur was accidentally discovered at a depth of 660 feet in a supposedly deep flank oil test. Later, both torsion-balance and seismograph surveys were made for the purpose of outlining the cap-rock area of the dome. Evidence tends to show that the original cap rock of the dome is of sedimentary origin; however, solution of the salt, as shown by the subsidence of the lake bottom and by drilling, indicates that at least a portion of the cap rock immediately adjacent to the salt is of residual origin. The novel necessity of mining sulphur in the middle of the lake involved several new engineering problems. A floating barge was developed for the drilling of the sulphur wells. The power plant is situated on the shore of the lake. The hot water, steam, air, and sulphur lines are carried to the point of mining operations by means of a trestle. The Frasch process is used in the mining of sulphur. Liquid sulphur from the wells in the lake is pumped to the shore, where it is allowed to cool and solidify in the large vats. It is then blasted down and loaded into cars for shipment.
http://search.datapages.com/data/ope...text%253Abrine
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The Swirling Vortex of Doom Pt. 1-drained_lakes_7a.jpg 


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