Short Stuff: Lake Peigneur

In 1980 something catastrophic happened to the quiet town of New Iberia, Louisiana. Their wide, shallow lake grew much deeper after it underwent an apocalyptic transformation. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey there, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck, and there's Jerry enof talking. Let's get started.
Let's uh, let's travel, my friend, to not only Louisiana,
Louisiana and nineteen eighty. Can you imagine, which I believe
the drinking age back then was still probably eighteen I

(00:25):
think so too. I wasn't they held out the longest,
and they think they did. And the FEDS were like,
well kiss kiss decent roads, goodbye until you've been to
our will states rights. Oh goodness, who knew that was
going to come up? Me? So in in uh Louisiana,
in Iberia Parish, around the town of New Iberia, there

(00:49):
is a Lake Chuck. And it's still there today, which
is not that surprising. It will become surprising that it's
still there shortly. It's called Lake Panier p E I
G N E U are Lake Pennier, Okay. And in
November of nineteen eighty, which is where we are right now,

(01:10):
there was like some Texico contractors who were doing some
exploratory drilling in Lake Panier. And Lake Pennier was really
really big, um how many acres acres? I mean at
least like five or six acre rcres of land, but

(01:31):
only eleven ft deep. Yeah, that was like, I think
one of the deepest points. I think the average was
just a handful of feet, so really really wide, but
really really shallow. And the other right, the other um
point about that is that Lake Pannier set on top
of what's called the salt dome. It's an accumulation of

(01:53):
salt that builds up underneath the ground. And there was
a company called the Diamond Crystal Salt Company and they
like to mind for salt around Lake Pin. Your and
all this is going on at the same day, at
the same time, on the same day in November that
the Texico Exploratory crew was drilling down through Lake Pin.

(02:13):
You're looking for gas deposits, that's right, And I think
you see where this might be headed. But the details
of this story are so bonkers. It's so nuts, it's
just crazy. So Texicos is drilling and they're probing the
floor and their drill all of a sudden just seizes
up and stops about twelve hundred or so feet below

(02:34):
the surface. So if you remember, this lake is only
eleven ft deep, so they are far far far, far
far below this lake, and they said, that's that's interesting.
This doesn't usually happen. Yeah, so what what happens when
your drill gets stuck in something? You try and work
it loose a little bit um, which if it shallow,
it's no big deal. When it's that deep, it's a
little bit different because you can't see what's going on.

(02:55):
And all of a sudden, these workers heard, you know,
pop boy awing, and this big rig all of a
sudden starts tilting toward the water, and they're like, mmmmm,
this is not good, guys. No, rigs are not supposed
to tilt. No, no, no, And this thing, uh, it's
a five million dollar drill, and it starts to sink,

(03:16):
and it starts to buck and it starts to move,
and all these dudes are like, all right, this is
not good at all. So we're gonna release ourself, uh,
release these barges that are attached. We're gonna get out
of here, and we're gonna get on shore, which they did, right,
So they got out of there. They made it safely.

(03:37):
But as they're on shore, like trying to figure out
what was going on, this is really weird. They're leaning
rig starts to kind of tip further and further into
the water, and surely at some point, if it's just
a few feet of water, should stop and stay above
the water. But these guys were really surprised when they
saw that the rig kept going underwater and underwater, and

(03:59):
then it just this ap peered from sight. Could you imagine? No,
I can't. But as they're sitting there scratching their heads
over this one um, they noticed that a there was
a whirlpool that was starting to form, just a little
bit at first around the point where the oil the
drill rig had just disappeared. And then it started to

(04:21):
come into view I guess in their mind's eye what
had just happened. And they realized pretty quickly that they
had accidentally drilled all the way down into one of
the main shafts of the salt mines, twelve feet below
Lake Penner. And now there was a hole connecting the

(04:43):
air above the lake and the hole underneath the lake,
with a lot of water in between just waiting to
get in. YEA, so this whirlpool is growing and growing.
It eventually grows in front of their eyeballs to a
quarter of a mile in diameter. That is so enormous.
It's so enormous. Uh. In the meantime, down in the
salt mine, Uh, there's an electrician named Juniors Gattison. He

(05:07):
heard bang pop boying and it's like, that doesn't sound good.
And all of a sudden, muddy water starts rushing in
and it's bringing fuel drums along the mine shaft and
he was like, this is not good. He calls in
an alarm, which is three blinks of the light. He
heads out. All the workers are like, all right, we

(05:27):
know what three blinks of a light means. That means
we need to drop everything and get out of here.
And these fifty or so dudes are fifteen feet underground.
I'm sorry, fifteen hundred feet underground. Fifteen ft would be
no big deal. And they start getting up to higher
levels and higher levels where they can get to these
elevators to get them out. They get to the third
level and it's blocked by these rising waters on the surface.

(05:54):
It's like, uh, something out of the Bible or an
X Files episode or something. What was originally a fourteen
inch hole in the ground in this mine starts to
fill up with water and all of a sudden water
hits salt, and that starts dissolving and dissolving. All these
columns of salt supporting these caves and tunnels start dissolving,

(06:18):
and this whole mine starts collapsing in front of everyone's
face and chuck all that water that's flowing through, dissolving
away the salt. That was like three and a half
billion gallons of water. So it's a substantial amount of
water starting to fill up that salt mine underneath. And
as the water is sinking down from the lake, it's
starting to flood upward towards the bottom of the lake,

(06:40):
which doesn't happen very often in Louisiana anywhere else really.
All Right, I think we should take a break. We'll
come back and finish this amazing story right after this.

(07:08):
This is an amazing story. I love this story. It's
one of my all time favorites. All Right. So below
the surface, um, they're these miners trying to get out.
They finally get up to level three where they can
access these elevators, but there's a ton of high water
blocking their route. They're using mine carts and and vehicles
powered by diesel to try and push their way through

(07:30):
and eventually all those fifty miners, uh, eight dudes at
a time are able to get into these elevators that
carry them to the surface. Uh. And it's not like
the speedy elevator. Imagine the waiting as this water is
rising for the elevator to come back was some seriously
scary stuff. Yeah, I mean eight at a time, there's

(07:51):
fifty of them down there, and the elevator slow as Christmas.
I can't imagine how stressful that must have been. And like,
how did you decide who went? You know, I mean
that's scary stuff. So as the miners are like starting
to like slowly come up like eight by eight um
above ground back up on the surface of the lake,
there's like this this this huge hole has opened up

(08:13):
where the whirlpool was, and the section from the whirlpool
has sucked the Gulf of Mexico in now. So like
there was three and a half billion gallons of Lake
Panier to begin with, but that whirlpool that created sucked
the water from Del Cambrie Canal that connects the Gulf
of Mexico and Lake Panire suck the Gulf of Mexico

(08:33):
into the lake and eleven barges that happened to be
in this miles long canal. Um got sucked into Lake Panier,
and that just sucked into Lake Panir, sucked down the
whirlpool into the salt mines underground. Yeah, so uh, eleven
barges gulp, Um, Jefferson Island seventy acres, big gulp, another

(08:56):
drilling platform, gulp. This little tugboats out there. God blessed
this little tug boat just doing everything it can to
get out of there and fight that current full power
to get basically sucked down what looks like a toilet.
Probably these dudes are like, I don't think we're gonna
make it. So they managed to get this thing over
close enough to the bank to jump off and then

(09:19):
by by tugboat gulp. Yeah, imagine that. Like just seeing
the tug boat, like, you're a tug boat is pretty
strong man, and the idea of it not being able
to fight this current, that just tells you how strong
that whirlpool was. So there goes the tugboat, There goes
eleven barges, oil, Derek, a lot of um, Jefferson Island
and um. Finally, after oh one, there was one other thing.

(09:42):
So this made the whole thing even more biblical, Chuck.
There was a lot of air down there in these
underground mine shafts, and as the water filled up the
mine shafts and displaced the air, that air came shooting
pressurized up to the surface. And so every once in
a while, like a geyser would shoot off like four
hundred feet into the air right out of Lake Panier.

(10:04):
All right, is that your fact of the show. That's
one of them. I think this whole thing is one
big factor of the show, because here's mine. Okay, So
what happens when you suck stuff down there and then
eventually that thing's gonna fill up. It's not just gonna
fill up the entire center of the earth with water.
Eventually the salt mine's gonna fill up, and it's gonna

(10:24):
sort of regulate and equalize. That eventually happens. Three point
five billion collons of water drain in three hours, and
then over the next couple of days, that lake level
eventually reaches that original waterline, and then over and over,
nine of these barges come popping back up like a

(10:44):
cork that you've been holding underwater. Just boom, boom, boom.
All these things just keep popping back up. It must
have been amazing to see that, to see a bar
just come popping up out of the water. No tug
boat though, No, no tug boat. And I think two
of the bars is they're still trapped down there along
with the tug boat and those the collapsed salt mines somewhere. Yeah.

(11:05):
I guess they're just wedged in there. Huh. Yep. So,
the the fact that the that Lake pin Your sucked
the Gulf of Mexico into the Lake Um, the fact
that the salt mines collapsed Um. Lake pin Your was
completely changed by this. Here's what Here's here's the actual
fact of the podcast. Not one person lost their life

(11:26):
or was seriously injured. That the fifty miners made it out,
the guys from the tug boat, from the oil um
drill rig, everybody made it out. Nobody was on Jefferson
Island that got sucked into the whirlpool. Not one person
died from this most colossal disaster, which is astounding. But
the lake itself was changed too. It went from being

(11:47):
a freshwater lake to a saltwater lake, and one that
was you know, a handful of feet deep to about
two feet deep. Now, yeah, it was initially like really
really deep, but that of aventually spread out in Uh.
I guess they settled on two feet as a good
new depth, right. Um. They had to pay out. Texico

(12:08):
of course had to pay out, you know, many millions
of dollars to the Assault mine company and other various
companies that are around there that got destroyed all these houses.
Of course, you know, the lake really really grew, um,
not only in depth but in size. So today it's
you know, basically sort of like a brackish saline lake.
Um you can see like closer to the shoreline, like

(12:31):
chimneys of houses that still pop above the surface. Yeah,
it's really an amazing story. And all of this happened
because the Texico engineer mistook one kind of map coordinates
for another and miscalculated where the salt mine was when
they were drilling. I'm surprised to hear that an oil
company was responsible for an ecological disaster, right, nice one, Chuck, Well,

(12:55):
that's the short stuff. Hat tipped to our pals Alan Bellows.
That damn interesting, and our frank Ken Jennings for uh
doing writing some good articles on this stuff. Uh and
uh I guess that's it, so short. Stuff Away. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit

(13:17):
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