sinkhole in the swamp
 

getting bigger and badder. mandatory evacuation. they're handing everyone $875 evacuation assistance checks, orders them to take only what they can quickly grab and carry and sends them down the road out of the area. officials seem to be a little worried the natural gas or the oil stored in the salt dome underneath might make a little bang if the hole keeps getting bigger and reaches the cavern. the one road coming from Baton Rouge and Morgan City thru Perre Part is closed.. that one salt dome is 1 mile x 3 miles but there are many other domes right near covering many many more miles in the area.. lezz see, a couple sq mile sized underground tank of natural gas, add little leak hundreds of feet across, hundreds of feet deep, some coonass fires up his burner to boil crabs at his camp across the bayou and Boom!... we might have a new tourist attraction..cajun version of the Grand Canyon... Petit Canyon..
years ago a rig drilling in a lake near Lafayette broke thru a dome. the lake emptied into the salt dome taking platforms/rig, boats, barges with it.. my father had a barge there that got sucked into the hole, disappeared underground for a while and popped back up later..

Officials upset by lack of salt dome info | News | The Advocate — Baton Rouge, LA
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Is a salt dome an old mine? How did anyone ever dig a mine here. I can't dig a post hole without hitting water

I've read about the old lake that emptied when the rig hit a salt mine. They say that eleven barges got sucked down and only nine popped back up later. The river flowed backwards for a while and something like 75 acres of land was lost.

Mother nature isn't an old girl that you should poke with a stick. If you make her angry, she'll put a hurtin' on you.

no, they are natural geological formations

McIlhenny uses one to store his Tabasco in - they age it in oak barrels, like a fine wine


with luck this one will suck down all the nutria and other invasive species...

Iron mountain the document storage and disposal company uses an old salt mine for storage.

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One of those mines that had Natural Gas belonged to Chevron. Right after this happened Chevron dumped millions of cubit feet of natural gas on the open market. Their are other caverns that do have gas left in them. LSU has said that if they were to blow it would be over 100 times the damage that the nuke did at Nagasaki. Right after this happened it was discovered that a 36" gas pipeline had been affected along with 2 18" lines, both at 800PSI. The 36" line has been moved 15 ft in toward the sink hole. It was immediately isolated. This could get very interesting.

little bit of salt dome trivia

the Bayou Corne salt dome is about 1/2 mile down under swam land. they get to it by pumping hot water down a drill hole to melt the salt and the brine is pumped out leaving empty caverns. there's about 1.5 MILLION gals of liquid butane stored under pressure in it right now.. would be pretty exciting if the dome collapses and releases clouds of butane gas just when a coonass at his camp across the bayou is fixing to light his burner and boil some crabs.

Avery island salt dome and 4 other nearby saltdome "islands" near New Iberia are each a couple sq miles of low hills surrounded by miles of completely flat swamp and dry ground. the salt is dug out deep underground and brought up vertical shafts. Avery Island was the first salt mine in the US amd one of the largest in the world. they started digging up salt on the surface in 1868 and now at 1600 feet deep, couple miles horizontal and 200million tons a year, there still enough salt to last a couple hundred more years mining. avery island salt dome is said to be as large as mt everest. just upside down and not as many have died on the treacherous climb trying to reach the peak(elev. 150').

Understatement of the week! Just hope no one does anything silly with a flame or spark...

Doesn't surprise me that LSU would say something like that.
They're completely wrong, but it doesn't surprise me.

One and half million cubic feet of liquid butane and natural gas, combined with a huge network of pipelines, surround by fractionation plants and compressor stations. I think LSU may have it correct...

Burning for 50 years: Darvaz: The Door to Hell - English Russia
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Or, could just collapse 30 stories: Sinkhole in Guatemala: Giant Could Get Even Bigger
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Wish I'd known about all of this when I was driving through the area on Thursday... Doesn't seem so flat and boring down there now....

flat down here? the tallest ground by far is the parish dump. everthing else is 8ft or less above sea level.