Ground Gives Way, and a Louisiana Town Struggles to Find Its Footing
Courtesy of Jeffrey Dubinsky/Louisiana Environmental Action Network. The Bayou Corne Sinkhole:
A video shot by John Boudreaux shows the destructive power of a giant sinkhole in Bayou Corne, La.
by Michael Wines, The New York Times, September 25, 2013
BAYOU CORNE, La. — It was nearly 16 months ago that Dennis P. Landry and his wife, Pat, on a leisurely cruise in their Starcraft pontoon boat, first noticed a froth of bubbles issuing from the depths of Bayou Corne, an idyllic, cypress-draped stream that meanders through swampy southern Louisiana. They figured it was a leaky gas pipeline. So did everyone else.
Just over two months later, in the predawn blackness of Aug. 3, 2012,
the earth opened up — a voracious maw 325 feet across and hundreds of
feet deep, swallowing 100-foot trees, guzzling water from adjacent
swamps and belching methane from a thousand feet or more beneath the
surface.
“I think I caught a glimpse of hell in it,” Mr. Landry said.
Since then, almost nothing here has been the same.
More than a year after it appeared, the Bayou Corne sinkhole is about 25
acres and still growing, almost as big as 20 football fields, lazily biting off chunks of forest and creeping hungrily toward an earthen berm built to contain its oily waters. It has its own Facebook page
and its own groupies, conspiracy theorists who insist the pit is
somehow linked to the Gulf of Mexico 50 miles south and the
earthquake-prone New Madrid fault 450 miles north. It has confounded
geologists who have struggled to explain this scar in the earth.
And it has split this unincorporated hamlet of about 300 people into two
camps: the hopeful, like Mr. Landry, who believe that things will
eventually settle down, and the despairing, who have mostly fled or plan
to, and blame their misery on state and corporate officials.
“Everything they’re doing, they were forced to do,” Mike Schaff, one of
those who is leaving, said of the officials. “They’ve taken no
initiative. I wanted to stay here. But the community is basically
destroyed.”
Drawls Mr. Landry: “I used to have a sign in my yard: ‘This too shall
pass.’ This, too, shall pass. We’re not there yet. But I’m a very
patient man.”
The sinkhole is worrisome enough. But for now, the principal villains
are the bubbles: flammable methane gas, surfacing not just in the bayou,
but in the swamp and in front and backyards across the area.
A few words of fantastical explanation: Much of Louisiana sits atop an
ancient ocean whose salty remains, extruded upward by the merciless
pressure of countless tons of rock, have formed at least 127 colossal
underground pillars. Seven hundred feet beneath Bayou Corne, the
Napoleonville salt dome stretches three miles long and a mile wide — and
plunges perhaps 30,000 feet to the old ocean floor.
A bevy of companies has long regarded the dome as more or less a
gigantic piece of Tupperware, a handy place to store propane, butane and
natural gas, and to make salt water for the area’s many chemical
factories. Over the years, they have repeatedly punched into the dome,
hollowing out 53 enormous caverns.
In 1982, on the dome’s western edge, Texas Brine Company sank a well to
begin work on a big cavern: 150 to 300 feet wide and four-tenths of a
mile deep, it bottomed out more than a mile underground. Until it capped
the well to the cavern in 2011, the company pumped in fresh water,
sucked out salt water and shipped it to the cavern’s owner, the
Occidental Chemical Corporation.
Who is to blame for what happened next is at issue in a barrage of
lawsuits. But at some point, the well’s western wall collapsed, and the
cavern began filling with mud and rock. The mud and rock above it
dropped into the vacated space, freeing trapped natural gas.
The gas floated up; the rock slipped down. The result was a yawning, bubbling sinkhole.
“You go in the swamp, and there are places where it’s coming up like
boiling crawfish,” said Mr. Schaff, who is moving out.
Mr. Landry, who is staying, agreed — “it looks like boiling water, like a
big pot” — but the two men and their camps agree on little else.
Geologists say the sinkhole will eventually stop growing, perhaps at 50
acres, but how long that will take is unclear. The state has imposed
tough regulations and monitoring on salt-dome caverns to forestall
future problems.
Under state order, Texas Brine has mounted a broad, though some say belated, effort to pump gas out of sandy underground layers where it has spread. Bayou Corne is pocked with freshly dug wells, with more to come, their pipes leading to flares that slowly burn off the methane. That, everyone concedes, could take years.
The two sides greet all that news in starkly different ways.
State surveys show that one of the largest concentrations of methane lies directly under Mr. Landry’s neighborhood, a manicured subdivision of brick homes, many with decks overlooking the bayou and its cypresses. Yet only two families have chosen to leave, and while the Landrys are packed just in case, the gas detector in their home offers enough reassurance to remain.
“Do you smell anything?” he asked. “Nope. Do we have gas bubbling up in
the bayou? Yes. Where does it go? Straight up. Have they closed the
bayou? No.”
The anger and misfortune are focused on Mr. Schaff’s neighborhood
directly across state route 70, a jumble of neat clapboard houses, less
tidy shotgun-style homes and trailers on narrow roads with names like
Sauce Piquante Lane and Jambalaya Street. There, rows of abandoned homes
are plastered with No Trespassing signs, and the streets are deathly
quiet.
Candy Blanchard, a teacher, and her husband, Todd, a welder, moved out
the day the sinkhole appeared. They now pay the monthly mortgage on
their empty and unsellable 7-year-old house as well as the rent on
another house. Mr. Blanchard drops by their former home each morning to
feed their rabbits and cat, who have lived alone for a year because
their landlord would accept only their dog.
The couple rejected an offer from Texas Brine to buy their home, and
instead have joined a class-action lawsuit against the company. They
will never return, she said, because they do not believe the area is
safe.
“The point we’re at now is what the scientists said would never happen,
that this would be the worst-case scenario,” Mrs. Blanchard said. “How
can you find experts on this when it has never happened anywhere else in
the world?”
Mr. Schaff’s home also fronts the bayou, and he says he is loath to
leave. But investigators found gas in his garage, he said, and he says
he is convinced that state officials are playing down the true scope of
the disaster.
A wry, amiable man with a salt-and-pepper goatee and glasses, Mr. Schaff said he had planned to retire on the bayou.
“It’s my home. I want to die there, O.K.?” he said, fighting off tears.
“I was going to retire next year, was going to do some fishing, play
with my grandchildren, do a little flying. And now, this.”
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