Where is louisiana sinkhole

Texas Brine have burned off millions of cubic feet of escaping gas and oil in an attempt to keep it out of the atmosphere. There are fears that the sinkhole might explode if the escaping gas ignites. This is the latest satellite image of the town from Google Earth: Spot the sinkhole!

Image: Google Earth. And the empty houses? The company has shut off utilities and is stripping out appliances, leaving them as empty shells. This article is from the CityMetric archive: some formatting and images may not be present.

Barbara Speed. Contact us. As perhaps the best indication of Texas Brine's inability to foresee the sinkhole, Garner pointed to the testimony of Ratigan. Known as "Dr. Salt," the OxyChem expert said he told state officials days before the sinkhole appeared in that a sinkhole was "highly unlikely.

Joe Ratigan? Vulcan, in a statement, said that the company approached Texas Brine in to dig three salt caverns, including Oxy-Geismar No. The statement added that it was the actions of OxyChem and Texas Brine after Vulcan sold the cavern that caused the sinkhole, noting Texas Brine officials testified in open court last year that had the cavern remained in its condition from , "there would have never been a sinkhole.

Vulcan also contended there was no reliable evidence before the sale to show how close the cavern was to the salt dome's outer face and suggested that their memo calling the then-proposed cavern a "multimillion dollar gamble" was based solely on how much brine the future cavern could produce. In divvying up responsibility, Kliebert found the decades of mining by Vulcan and Texas Brine through brought the cavern close to the salt edge.

Salt caverns are often filled with highly concentrated brine when they are closed. Like the air in a balloon, the brine helps maintain a shut cavern's supporting salt structure against geologic forces that naturally press down on the underground cavity.

Kliebert accepted the Texas Brine expert's theory that an oil formation, depleted and depressurized from the old well, was tied into the cavern due to fractures in the thin salt wall. The oil formation provided a place for leaking brine to go that otherwise would not exist so deep underground.

Kliebert found OxyChem and its corporate allies were the only parties with financial interests in both the oil well and the salt cavern, but they failed to keep other companies involved in the cavern informed about the oil well's long-term status. He found OxyChem fully liable for the well's part in the failure and dismissed the drilling companies involved with the well.

The judge concluded that while salt mining is intricate, it doesn't take "a post-graduate degree in mining engineering to be aware of the risks associated with creating these massive caverns. Edit Close. Toggle navigation. Francisville St.

Close 1 of 3. Aerial of the sinkhole near Bayou Corne Wednesday, Aug. Adam Lau. Residents reluctantly let go of cherished way of life on Bayou Corne. Mitchell dmitchell theadvocate. Four years later last evacaution orders lifted at Bayou Corne sinkhole. Top stories in Baton Rouge in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Petrochemical giants came for other reasons: the chemicals in the salt domes and the oil and gas reserves that surround them.

Gas and brine pipelines cross over and under the town and its surrounding swamps, carving up the basin into a web of rights of way for companies including Chevron, Dow, Crosstex, and Florida Gas. At that depth, 3-D seismic mapping is both time-consuming and expensive, and as a consequence, injection-mining companies often have only a foggy—and outdated—idea of what their mines really look like.

When Texas Brine applied for a permit to expand Oxy3 in , the company pressure-tested the cavern as mandated by the state, but it was unable to build up the requisite pressure, let alone sustain it. The agency did not, as it sometimes does, request further monitoring.

Both parties expected the cavern to hold its shape, and it did until early June , when Gary Metrejean felt the ground shake. But his neighbors noticed it, too. Oxy3 was starting to cave in, but at the time the community was at a loss. At the end of July , with tremors and bubbling increasing and no clear signs of subsidence, Texas Brine, which had emerged as a possible culprit, told state officials that a sinkhole was highly unlikely.

On August 3, Bayou Corne residents awoke to the smell of sweet crude emanating from a gaping pit on the other side of the highway.

Bobby Jindal issued an evacuation order that afternoon. Texas Brine got a permit to drill a relief well. When the company finally accessed the plugged chamber, they found the outer wall of the salt dome had collapsed. The breach allowed sediment to pour into the cavern, creating a seam through which oil and explosive gases were forced up to the surface.

It has been well established that structurally challenged caverns, owing to a lack of maintenance or poor planning, can cause sinkholes. In , the collapse of a brining cavern at Bayou Choctaw, north of Baton Rouge—located in the same dome that today houses part of the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve—created an foot-wide lake.

But those disasters were all due to top-down pressure. Oxy3 collapsed from the side, something regulators and briners had previously considered impossible—highlighting, once again, how poorly understood the geology of salt caverns truly is.

Celebrity activist Erin Brockovich has been shuttling back and forth to Bayou Corne enlisting plaintiffs. Responsible Care. Given the class action, Texas Brine has a financial interest in deflecting the blame.

During our outing, Cranch floats two possible culprits for the sinkhole: an oil well that another company drilled just outside the edge of the dome in the s, or perhaps an earthquake. The locals find such theories particularly irksome.