Huge artificial water swirls swallow the island

The whirlpool is formed by a small negligence of humans swallowing an island of nearly 300,000 square meters, two rigs and many barges, and at the same time the island flows into the Gulf of Mexico.

According to LosApos.com, in 1980, Lake Peigneur was a normal water area located near the Gulf of Mexico and New Iberia, Louisiana, USA. This freshwater lake covers an area of ​​5.3 km ² and is only 2.1 m deep, below the lake is a salt mine. Jefferson's small island in the middle of the lake has a beautiful park.

Today, the Peigneur Lake becomes a saltwater lake up to nearly 400m deep , which once suffered the largest artificial whirlpool sweep of the birth due to an accident. On November 20, 1980, while a group of workers were exploring oil beneath the lake Peigneur, their drill suddenly caught at a depth of about 375m below the mud surface and they could not draw the drill. After an effort to pull up the drill, the workers heard a series of loud explosions, then the rig tilted to one side.

Concluding that something unusual happened, the workers cut the barge, hurriedly pulled out of the rig and moved to shore. Only a short time after leaving the $ 5 billion rig, they were amazed to see the giant rig and crane collapsing and disappearing under the lake surface that was just over two meters deep. Soon after, the water around the rig position began to rotate. At first, the water ring rotated slowly but its speed rapidly increased until it became a whirlpool with a diameter of more than 400m with the focal point right above the lower section of the drill.

Lake Peigneur today.(Photo: LosApos).

While the whirlpool formed on the lake surface, an electric worker working at the salt mine below heard a strange loud noise approaching. This person found that the source of the sound was caused by fuel tanks hitting each other when they were swept away by a stream of muddy water. Workers quickly signal evacuation. About 50 miners are working at a depth of 457m below the water surface to detect evacuation signals and start running to the elevator leading to the ground. Although the slow elevator only carried 8 people at a time, all miners were lucky to escape when the mines at their feet were flooded.

In fact, salt mine arches are pierced by drill bits . Texaco, the company that conducted oil exploration, considered the location of the salt mine and carefully planned it, but due to the mistake in the calculation, the drilling site was right on one of the upper segments of the salt mine. When overflowing through the hole at the head only 36cm wide, the water quickly dissolves the salt, causing the hole to expand in just a few seconds. Water overflowing into the mine also dissolved the giant salt pillars that served as a ceiling support to the mine and collapsed salt mines.

At the same time on the surface, the intense attraction of the whirlpool also destroyed everything around. It swallowed another oil rig nearby, along with a pier, more than 280,000 square meters of land from Jefferson Island, many trucks, trees, buildings and parking lots. This attraction is so strong that it changes the 19km long channel from the lake to the Gulf of Mexico, pulling 11 barges moving along the canal into the water and burying them beneath the salt mine.

After only three hours, more than 13 billion liters of lake water were drained. Water from the Gulf of Mexico flows into the lake through the canal, forming a 46m-high waterfall that flows into the pit and fills the lake. When the crater was filled with water after two days, nine of the sunken barges floated to the surface, and the rig was permanently buried under a salt mine.

Whirlpools cause huge physical losses, there are no serious casualties in this disaster. Within two days, a two meter deep freshwater lake was replaced by a 400m deep saltwater lake. The ecosystem of the lake also changes with the appearance of many new species of plants and fish.