Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Lake Peigneur

Episode Date: April 10, 2019

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.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Go to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry. Enough talking. Let's get started. Let's travel my friend to not only Louisiana, but Louisiana in 1980. Can you imagine? Which I believe the drinking age back then was still probably 18.

I think so too. They held out the longest, didn't they? I think they did. And the feds were like, well, kiss decent roads goodbye until you bend to our will. States of rights. Oh goodness. Who knew that was going to come up? No, me.

So in Louisiana, in Iberia Parish, around the town of New Iberia, there is a lake, Chuck, and it's still there today, which is not that surprising, although it will become surprising that it's still there shortly. It's called Lake Penyer, P-E-I-G-N-E-U-R, Lake Penyer. And in November of 1980, which is where we are right now, there was some Texaco contractors who were doing some exploratory drilling in Lake Penyer. And Lake Penyer was really, really big. How many acres were there?

1,300 acres? I mean, at least like five or six acres. Right. Yeah, 1,300 acres of land, but only 11 feet 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.

That's right. Like us. Right, the other point about that is that Lake Penyer is set on top of what's called the salt dome. It's an accumulation of salt that builds up underneath the ground. And there was a company called the Diamond Crystal Salt Company, and they like to mine for salt around Lake Penyer. And all this was going on at the same time on the same day in November that the Texaco

exploratory crew was drilling down through Lake Penyer looking for gas deposits. That's right. And I think you see where this might be headed, but the details of the story are so bonkers. It's so nuts. It's just crazy. So, Texaco's is drilling, and they're probing the floor, and their drill all of a sudden just seizes up and stops about 1,200 or so feet below the surface. So if you remember, this lake is only 11 feet deep.

So they are far, far, far, far, far below this lake. And they said, that's interesting. This doesn't usually happen. Yeah. So what happens when your drill gets stuck in something, you try and work it loose a little bit, which if it shallows, no big deal. When it's that deep, it's a little bit different because you can't see what's going on. And all of a sudden, these workers heard, you know, pop, and this big rig all of a sudden

starts tilting toward the water, and they're like, hmm, this is not good, guys. No rigs are not supposed to tilt. No, no, no. And this thing, it's a $5 million drill, and it starts to sink, 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 going to release these barges that are attached. We're going to get out of here, and we're going to get on shore, which they did. Right.

So they got out of there, they made it safely. But as they're on shore, like trying to figure out what is going on, this is really weird. Their 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, it 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 then it just disappeared from sight. Could you imagine?

No, I can't. But as they're sitting there, scratching their heads over this one, they noticed that 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 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, thirteen hundred feet below Lake Pinyur. And now there is a hole connecting the air above the lake and the hole underneath the

lake with a lot of water in between, just waiting to get in. Yes. 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. In the meantime, down in the salt mine, there's an electrician named Junius Gadison. He heard bang, pop, boing, and he was 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 know what three blinks of the light means. That means we need to drop everything and get out of here. And these 50 or so dudes are 1500 feet underground, 15 feet would be no big deal.

Yeah, they'd be like, we're fine. 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, it's like something out of the Bible or an ex files episode or something. What was originally a 14 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 and this

whole mine starts collapsing in front of everyone's face. And Chuck, all of 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 toward the bottom of the lake, which doesn't happen very often in Louisiana or anywhere else really. All right, I think we should take a break and we'll come back and finish this amazing story right after this.

On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. This episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing

on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesha Tickler and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. Lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running

and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, cancelled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Find a skyline drive in the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an amazing story. I love this story. It's one of my all-time favorites. All right. So below the surface, there are 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 vehicles powered by diesel to try and push their way through. And eventually, all those 50 miners, eight dudes at a time, are able to get into these elevators that carry them to the surface. And it's not like a speedy elevator. And 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 50 of them down there, and the elevator slows Christmas. I can't imagine how stressful that must have been. And how did you decide who went? I mean, that's scary stuff. So as the miners are starting to slowly come up eight by eight, above ground, back up on the surface of the lake, there's this huge hole has opened up where the whirlpool was. And the suction from the whirlpool has sucked the Gulf of Mexico in now.

So there was three and a half billion gallons of Lake Panyur to begin with. But that whirlpool that created sucked the water from Del Cambrie Canal that connects the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Panyur, sucked the Gulf of Mexico into the lake and 11 barges that happened to be in this miles long canal got sucked into Lake Panyur and not just sucked into Lake Panyur, sucked down the whirlpool into the salt mines underground. Yeah. So 11 barges, Gulf, Jefferson Island, 70 acres big, Gulf, another drilling platform, Gulf. This little tugboats out there, God bless this little tugboat.

Just doing everything it can to get out of there and fight that current. Full power to get basically sucked down to what looks like a toilet probably. These dudes are like, I don't think we're going to make it. So they managed to get this thing over close enough to the bank to jump off and then bye-bye tugboat, Gulf. Yeah. Imagine that, like just seeing the tugboat, like your tugboat 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 11 barges, oil derrick, a lot of Jefferson Island. And finally, after, oh, there was one other thing. 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 400 feet into the air right out of Lake Pinyur. All right. Is that your fact of the show? That's one of them. I think this whole thing is one big fact of the show. Because here's mine. Okay.

So what happens when you suck stuff down there and then eventually that thing's going to fill up? It's not just going to fill up the entire center of the earth with water. Eventually the salt mine's going to fill up and it's going to sort of regulate and equalize. What eventually happens, 3.5 billion gallons of water drain in three hours. And then over the next couple of days, that lake level eventually reaches that original water line. And then over and over, nine of these barges come popping back up like a 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 barge just come popping up out of the water. No tugboat though. No. No tugboat.

And I think two of the barges are still trapped down there along with the tugboat in the collapsed salt mines somewhere. Yeah. I guess they're just wedged in there, huh? Yep. So the fact that Lake Pinyur sucked the Gulf of Mexico into the lake, the fact that the salt mines collapsed, Lake Pinyur was completely changed by this. Here's the actual fact of the podcast.

That one person lost their life or was seriously injured. Yeah, that's pretty remarkable. The 50 miners made it out. The guys from the tugboat, from the oil 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 a freshwater lake to a saltwater lake and one that was a handful of

feet deep to about 200 feet deep now. Yeah, it was initially really, really deep, but that eventually spread out in, I guess they settled on 200 feet as a good new depth. They had to pay out, Texaco of course had to pay out many millions of dollars to the salt mine company and other various companies that were around there that got destroyed. All these houses, of course, the lake really, really grew not only in depth, but in size. So today it's basically sort of like a brackish saline lake. You can see closer to the shoreline chimneys of houses that still pop above the surface.

That's crazy. Yeah, it's really an amazing story. And all of this happened because the Texaco 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. Nice one, Chuck. Well, that's the short stuff, hat tip to our pals, Alan Bellows at Damn Interesting and our friend Ken Jennings for writing some good articles on this stuff.

And I guess that's it. So short stuff away. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. People podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.