Where Is The Lake That Late We Had?

Lake Peigneur was a pretty, ten-foot deep freshwater lake in Louisiania popular with fishermen from the surrounding area. A small island on the lake was given over to a pretty botanical garden, and the area was rich in natural mineral resources: deep underneath it were miles of tunnels given over to the Diamond Crystal salt mine, and across the surrounding landscape were dotted richly productive oil wells.
Early one November morning in 1980, twelve employees of Texaco petroleum, aboard an oil rig in the middle of the lake, were drilling an exploratory hole when their drilling rig suddenly seized up, more than 1,000 feet below the surface.
Try as they might, they couldn’t seem to free it. Suddenly, there came a series of ominous plops and belches from the muddy depths, and the rig listed over alarmingly. The oilmen weren’t sure what was going to happen, but decided that the safest place to watch it from was the shore.
As they reached shore, behind them the $5 million rig turned turtle and vanished beneath the surface of the lake – a lake that was supposed to be only ten feet deep. Moments later, where the rig had been, the water started to turn. A whirlpool formed.
Texaco, as it turned out, had miscalculated the position of the Diamond Crystal salt mine, and drilled a 14” hole in the top of one of the main shafts. The water rushed into the salt dome, dissolving the salt and steadily enlarging the hole as it went.
As if the plug had been pulled out of a ten-square-mile bathtub – the entire contents of the lake started to disappear into the mines.
As miners scrambled to evacuate the salt mines and the oilmen watched the carnage, gobsmacked, from the shore, one local fisherman steered his boat to shore, tied it to a tree and leaped out -- only to watch boat and tree both vanish into the whirlpool. Pockets of compressed air in the salt-mines exploded into 400ft geysers.
The whirlpool also swallowed another drilling platform, a barge loading dock, five houses, 70 acres of soil from Jefferson Island, most of the botanical gardens, trucks, trees, a motor home and a parking lot. So powerful was the suction that it reversed the flow of a canal leading from the lake to the Gulf of Mexico, creating a 164-foot waterfall (the tallest – temporarily -- in the state of Louisiana) and sucking 11 barges and a manned tugboat into the salt mines.
Two days later, nine of the barges popped back up to the surface like corks.
Nobody was hurt.