Lake Peigneur Starts Disappearing Into a Salt Mine

The lake finds the basement

Lake Peigneur near New Iberia, Louisiana, was an unusual place even before the disaster.

It was broad but shallow, covering roughly 1,300 acres while reaching only about eleven feet deep in much of its pre-disaster form.

Oil drilling took place around and on the lake.

Far below it, miners worked inside the Diamond Crystal salt mine beneath Jefferson Island.

On the morning of 20 November 1980, a drilling crew working from a rig on the lake ran into trouble.

The drill became stuck more than 1,200 feet below the surface.

Then the rig began to tilt.

The workers abandoned it.

Below them, water had found its way into the underground mine workings. As fresh water entered the salt formation, the opening enlarged and the situation escalated rapidly.

A vortex developed.

The drilling rig disappeared.

The lake began draining through the opening into the mine.

Boats, barges, trees and sections of shoreline were pulled toward the growing crater. Contemporary reporting described the scene as the lake emptying like a bathtub.

Underground, approximately fifty salt-mine workers had to evacuate.

Above, the drilling crew also fled.

Remarkably, everyone escaped without reported human injury.

Then the plumbing of the landscape effectively reversed.

As Lake Peigneur's water level fell, water from the Delcambre Canal — normally draining away from the lake toward lower waterways connected to the Gulf — began flowing toward Lake Peigneur instead. Historical and academic accounts describe a temporary waterfall forming as the canal poured into the drastically altered basin.

The disaster permanently changed the lake.

Its previous shallow freshwater form was gone, and the inflow of salt water changed its character.

In the aftermath came lawsuits and arguments over responsibility. The salt company blamed the drilling operation; Texaco disputed aspects of that account and raised questions about mine information and drilling coordinates. Later settlements resolved litigation without turning the event into the kind of single-sentence explanation that popular retellings often prefer.

The safe historical core is extraordinary enough:

An oil-drilling operation encountered an underground salt mine.

The mine took the lake.