Errors in Engineering
Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 12:00 Zoy Clem in Disaster, Geology, History, Machinery, You Tell Me | Post a Comment Salt and oil rested in large deposits under the bed of a 10-foot-deep freshwater lake in Louisiana, named Lake Peigneur, and both resources were being extracted without incident until yesterday in the year 1980, when an oil rig run by the Wilson Brothers Company, for Texaco, began to drill in the wrong location and poked a hole into the shaft of a salt mine underneath the lake, causing the water to drain away into the mine, and creating a large sinkhole that swallowed the oil rig and a number of other structures. The lake did not completely empty, as backfill from the Delcambre Canal replenished the lost water, but Lake Peigneur's content has changed from fresh to brackish saltwater.
Three dogs died in the accident. Gaia was just happy it wasn't of the same magnitude as a Hadron Collider miscalculation...
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