Today In History: The Lake Peigneur Disaster
November 21rst: Today in 1980 Texaco oil drilling rig looking for oil under Lake Peigneur in Louisiana managed to punch a hole through the bottom of the lake into a salt mine under the lake with a 14″ drill bit causing a spectacular disaster. The small hole acted as drain to the lake, sucking the oil rig, barges and part of an island down through the small hole into the salt mines below creating a giant whirlpool that completely emptied the lake into the mines. The miners escaped the mine and nobody was killed in the disaster, but what was once as shallow freshwater lake was now a deep salt water lake thanks to a major location miscalculation by the drilling team. A good account can be read here are Damn Interesting and some great video is below.
November 21st, 2006 at 9:00 pm
I knew about it, but I hadn’t seen any footage. Wow.
November 23rd, 2006 at 9:23 am
Good Golly!!! That was just bogglingly amazing.
November 23rd, 2006 at 7:14 pm
It is so good that when I stumbled across it I thought they must be making it up. It took a bit of research for me to believe it wasn’t an elaborate internet hoax…
November 24th, 2006 at 10:18 am
I mentioned it to my father-in-law yesterday (he’s a retired engineer) and he knew about it. Charley had heard about it, but had never seen the films. I know what you mean about thinking that it couldn’t be real at first.