All photos courtesy of Unsplash
Disasters can be due to many factors. Some we call natural disasters such as earthquake, fire, storm, tornadoes, volcanoes or wave/tsunami damage and they can lead to many deaths and terrible destruction of property. Some disasters are man made and are the result of lack of knowledge, failure to gain information or simply stupidity.
Some oil workers were employed by the Texaco Oil Company to drill for oil in a lake in Louisiana. The place was Lake Peigneur and so they went with the latest sophisticated equipment and started to drill. This all took place in November 1980. Apparently their calculations informed them that there was an abundance of oil in the area and that it would soon gush to the surface. They drilled for several hours and then they decided to sit back and wait for the expected upsurge of oil from below. Their expectations were to be sadly dashed and a dreadful disaster took place that day.
Instead of oil gushing upwards a whirlpool formed and all the water in the entire 1,300 acre lake was sucked down below. Also five houses on the shoreline were sucked in to the whirlpool as well as eleven barges, some tug boats, two oil rigs and a mobile home. That was not all as the nearby botanical garden was also destroyed and Jefferson Island lost ten percent of its land surface. The end result was a half-mile crater. One local fisherman said that he thought the world was coming to an end. It was a dramatic conclusion to an attempt to find oil.
