Short Stuff: Lake Peigneur

Published Apr 10, 2019, 3:45 PM

In 1980 something catastrophic happened to the quiet town of New Iberia, Louisiana. Their wide, shallow lake grew much deeper after it underwent an apocalyptic transformation. 

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Hey there, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and there's Jerry enof talking. Let's get started. Let's uh, let's travel, my friend, to not only Louisiana, Louisiana and nineteen eighty. Can you imagine, which I believe the drinking age back then was still probably eighteen I think so too. I wasn't they held out the longest, and they think they did. And the FEDS were like, well kiss kiss decent roads, goodbye until you've been to our will states rights. Oh goodness, who knew that was going to come up? Me? So in in uh Louisiana, in Iberia Parish, around the town of New Iberia, there is a Lake Chuck. And it's still there today, which is not that surprising. It will become surprising that it's still there shortly. It's called Lake Panier p E I G N E U are Lake Pennier, Okay. And in November of nineteen eighty, which is where we are right now, there was like some Texico contractors who were doing some exploratory drilling in Lake Panier. And Lake Pennier was really really big, um how many acres acres? I mean at least like five or six acre rcres of land, but only eleven ft deep. Yeah, that was like, I think one of the deepest points. I think the average was just a handful of feet, so really really wide, but really really shallow. And the other right, the other um point about that is that Lake Pannier set on top of what's called the salt dome. It's an accumulation of salt that builds up underneath the ground. And there was a company called the Diamond Crystal Salt Company and they like to mind for salt around Lake Pin. Your and all this is going on at the same day, at the same time, on the same day in November that the Texico Exploratory crew was drilling down through Lake Pin. You're looking for gas deposits, that's right, And I think you see where this might be headed. But the details of this story are so bonkers. It's so nuts, it's just crazy. So Texicos is drilling and they're probing the floor and their drill all of a sudden just seizes up and stops about twelve hundred or so feet below the surface. So if you remember, this lake is only eleven ft deep, so they are far far far, far far below this lake, and they said, that's that's interesting. This doesn't usually happen. Yeah, so what what happens when your drill gets stuck in something? You try and work it loose a little bit um, which if it shallow, it's no big deal. When it's that deep, it's a little bit different because you can't see what's going on. And all of a sudden, these workers heard, you know, pop boy awing, and this big rig all of a sudden starts tilting toward the water, and they're like, mmmmm, this is not good, guys. No, rigs are not supposed to tilt. No, no, no, And this thing, uh, it's a five million dollar drill, and it starts to sink, and it starts to buck and it starts to move, and all these dudes are like, all right, this is not good at all. So we're gonna release ourself, uh, release these barges that are attached. We're gonna get out of here, and we're gonna get on shore, which they did, right, So they got out of there. They made it safely. But as they're on shore, like trying to figure out what was going on, this is really weird. They're leaning rig starts to kind of tip further and further into the water, and surely at some point, if it's just a few feet of water, should stop and stay above the water. But these guys were really surprised when they saw that the rig kept going underwater and underwater, and then it just this ap peered from sight. Could you imagine? No, I can't. But as they're sitting there scratching their heads over this one um, they noticed that a there was a whirlpool that was starting to form, just a little bit at first around the point where the oil the drill rig had just disappeared. And then it started to come into view I guess in their mind's eye what had just happened. And they realized pretty quickly that they had accidentally drilled all the way down into one of the main shafts of the salt mines, twelve feet below Lake Penner. And now there was a hole connecting the air above the lake and the hole underneath the lake, with a lot of water in between just waiting to get in. YEA, so this whirlpool is growing and growing. It eventually grows in front of their eyeballs to a quarter of a mile in diameter. That is so enormous. It's so enormous. Uh. In the meantime, down in the salt mine, Uh, there's an electrician named Juniors Gattison. He heard bang pop boying and it's like, that doesn't sound good. And all of a sudden, muddy water starts rushing in and it's bringing fuel drums along the mine shaft and he was like, this is not good. He calls in an alarm, which is three blinks of the light. He heads out. All the workers are like, all right, we know what three blinks of a light means. That means we need to drop everything and get out of here. And these fifty or so dudes are fifteen feet underground. I'm sorry, fifteen hundred feet underground. Fifteen ft would be no big deal. And they start getting up to higher levels and higher levels where they can get to these elevators to get them out. They get to the third level and it's blocked by these rising waters on the surface. It's like, uh, something out of the Bible or an X Files episode or something. What was originally a fourteen inch hole in the ground in this mine starts to fill up with water and all of a sudden water hits salt, and that starts dissolving and dissolving. All these columns of salt supporting these caves and tunnels start dissolving, and this whole mine starts collapsing in front of everyone's face and chuck all that water that's flowing through, dissolving away the salt. That was like three and a half billion gallons of water. So it's a substantial amount of water starting to fill up that salt mine underneath. And as the water is sinking down from the lake, it's starting to flood upward towards the bottom of the lake, which doesn't happen very often in Louisiana anywhere else really. All Right, I think we should take a break. We'll come back and finish this amazing story right after this. This is an amazing story. I love this story. It's one of my all time favorites. All Right. So below the surface, um, they're these miners trying to get out. They finally get up to level three where they can access these elevators, but there's a ton of high water blocking their route. They're using mine carts and and vehicles powered by diesel to try and push their way through and eventually all those fifty miners, uh, eight dudes at a time are able to get into these elevators that carry them to the surface. Uh. And it's not like the speedy elevator. Imagine the waiting as this water is rising for the elevator to come back was some seriously scary stuff. Yeah, I mean eight at a time, there's fifty of them down there, and the elevator slow as Christmas. I can't imagine how stressful that must have been. And like, how did you decide who went? You know, I mean that's scary stuff. So as the miners are like starting to like slowly come up like eight by eight um above ground back up on the surface of the lake, there's like this this this huge hole has opened up where the whirlpool was, and the section from the whirlpool has sucked the Gulf of Mexico in now. So like there was three and a half billion gallons of Lake Panier to begin with, but that whirlpool that created sucked the water from Del Cambrie Canal that connects the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Panire suck the Gulf of Mexico into the lake and eleven barges that happened to be in this miles long canal. Um got sucked into Lake Panier, and that just sucked into Lake Panir, sucked down the whirlpool into the salt mines underground. Yeah, so uh, eleven barges gulp, Um, Jefferson Island seventy acres, big gulp, another drilling platform, gulp. This little tugboats out there. God blessed this little tug boat just doing everything it can to get out of there and fight that current full power to get basically sucked down what looks like a toilet. Probably these dudes are like, I don't think we're gonna make it. So they managed to get this thing over close enough to the bank to jump off and then by by tugboat gulp. Yeah, imagine that. Like just seeing the tug boat, like, you're a tug boat is pretty strong man, and the idea of it not being able to fight this current, that just tells you how strong that whirlpool was. So there goes the tugboat, There goes eleven barges, oil, Derek, a lot of um, Jefferson Island and um. Finally, after oh one, there was one other thing. So this made the whole thing even more biblical, Chuck. There was a lot of air down there in these underground mine shafts, and as the water filled up the mine shafts and displaced the air, that air came shooting pressurized up to the surface. And so every once in a while, like a geyser would shoot off like four hundred feet into the air right out of Lake Panier. All right, is that your fact of the show. That's one of them. I think this whole thing is one big factor of the show, because here's mine. Okay, So what happens when you suck stuff down there and then eventually that thing's gonna fill up. It's not just gonna fill up the entire center of the earth with water. Eventually the salt mine's gonna fill up, and it's gonna sort of regulate and equalize. That eventually happens. Three point five billion collons of water drain in three hours, and then over the next couple of days, that lake level eventually reaches that original waterline, and then over and over, nine of these barges come popping back up like a cork that you've been holding underwater. Just boom, boom, boom. All these things just keep popping back up. It must have been amazing to see that, to see a bar just come popping up out of the water. No tug boat though, No, no tug boat. And I think two of the bars is they're still trapped down there along with the tug boat and those the collapsed salt mines somewhere. Yeah. I guess they're just wedged in there. Huh. Yep. So, the the fact that the that Lake pin Your sucked the Gulf of Mexico into the Lake Um, the fact that the salt mines collapsed Um. Lake pin Your was completely changed by this. Here's what Here's here's the actual fact of the podcast. Not one person lost their life or was seriously injured. That the fifty miners made it out, the guys from the tug boat, from the oil um drill rig, everybody made it out. Nobody was on Jefferson Island that got sucked into the whirlpool. Not one person died from this most colossal disaster, which is astounding. But the lake itself was changed too. It went from being a freshwater lake to a saltwater lake, and one that was you know, a handful of feet deep to about two feet deep. Now, yeah, it was initially like really really deep, but that of aventually spread out in Uh. I guess they settled on two feet as a good new depth, right. Um. They had to pay out. Texico of course had to pay out, you know, many millions of dollars to the Assault mine company and other various companies that are around there that got destroyed all these houses. Of course, you know, the lake really really grew, um, not only in depth but in size. So today it's you know, basically sort of like a brackish saline lake. Um you can see like closer to the shoreline, like chimneys of houses that still pop above the surface. Yeah, it's really an amazing story. And all of this happened because the Texico engineer mistook one kind of map coordinates for another and miscalculated where the salt mine was when they were drilling. I'm surprised to hear that an oil company was responsible for an ecological disaster, right, nice one, Chuck, Well, that's the short stuff. Hat tipped to our pals Alan Bellows. That damn interesting, and our frank Ken Jennings for uh doing writing some good articles on this stuff. Uh and uh I guess that's it, so short. Stuff Away. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

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