# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
08.22.13: Bayou Corne Sinkhole Swallows Stand of Trees 40 ft high.LIVE FOOTAGE, SPECULATIONS & FACTS

# data[].attributes.body
Focus: The Bayou Corne Sinkhole

# data[].attributes.body
The Bayou Corne Sinkhole began in August of 2012 when a large cavity developed in Bayou Corne, LA. A local oil company, Texas Brine, had begun work in the area even though they were advised not to (because of environmental conditions). The sinkhole appeared when the Earth opened up and created the massive hole filled with water. Because of the unexpectedness of the sinkhole, residents in the area had no warning of its dangers and were forced to evacuate. The diesel smells and toxic materials surrounding the area made it extremely unsafe for the residents. When at its peak, the sinkhole was the size of the roof of the Mercedes--Benz Super Dome, according to Resource #2.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
More than four years since the Bayou Corne sinkhole appeared, Assumption Parish officials declared on Friday that the once growing, burping, oily swampland hole that made worldwide headlines had settled down enough to no longer pose a risk to the public.

Parish officials completely lifted the remaining voluntary evacuation orders in last parts of the Bayou Corne community where the few remaining residents had remained, saying risk from instability and seeping, flammable natural gas released in the sinkhole's formation have been mitigated.

"Through the preponderance of evidence, the area has been deemed no longer at risk due to the sinkhole and gas associated with its creation," parish officials said in a statement.

The order had been coming for months after parish officials in late June significantly dialed back evacuation orders tied to the 34-acre hole, which could resemble any other cypress-lined lake in Louisiana if not for a containment levee and other monitoring and equipment around it.

For a time, the sinkhole grew rapidly, swallowing whole trees, but eventually slowed down considerably and has largely stabilized in recent years. The methane gas released in the sinkhole's formation, however, remained an ever-present risk to residents.

Texas Brine was deemed the responsible party after one of its underground salt dome caverns had been tied the sinkhole's formation by state experts. Texas Brine and its insurers bought out much of the Bayou Corne and Grand Bayou communities, and lawsuits began to be filed.

Dennis Landry, who lives with his wife in Bayou Corne and owns vacation cabins and a boat launch in the Sportsman Drive area that had still been under the evacuation order, said he is happy to see the order lifted.

"I can't speak for everybody here, but I think people are ready. I think they're ready for that evacuation order to be lifted. I think most of them feel like it's time, enough time has passed," Landry said.

Texas Brine, which has pressed for more than year to remove the evacuation orders, welcomed the parish's decision, saying it was glad to see state and local officials agree with the company that its "response priorities have been satisfied and that the sinkhole does not pose a risk to Bayou Corne."

Texas Brine officials in their statement reiterated their position that the sinkhole was not their company's fault.

Still, Landry said, he would like to see Texas Brine continue to monitor the sinkhole. Landry echoed the sentiment of the parish Police Jury, which in August adopted a resolution asking the state Office of Conservation to hold Texas Brine to its previous promises for additional testing and monitoring after the evacuation order was lifted.

But on Friday, Commissioner Richard Ieyoub, after considering the resolution and asking Texas Brine to respond to it, relieved the company of many of its monitoring requirements, agreeing that the company had mitigated the gas risk enough for the remaining populated areas of Bayou Corne.

A few considerably weakened gas bubble sites remain in area waterways and Texas Brine's own geologic expert says gas removal did not quite hit, but got very close, to the safety standard set by a special state panel. Ieyoub relieved Texas Brine of gas removal duties but required them to monitor wells that had been used to remove the gas but were no longer able to do so.

Patrick Courreges, spokesman for the Office of Conservation and state Department of Natural Resources, said the data show the risk from methane has been minimized to the extent the gas can be practically removed. The swamp area also naturally has gas bubbles.

Ieyoub also relieved Texas Brine of many of the seismic monitoring requirements and of area and indoor air monitoring of resident's homes for methane and other gases. He also lessened how much the company must monitor for sinkhole water levels, edge collapses and other subsidence, requiring that the company must monitor the top of the sinkhole containment levee until end of 2017.

The state officials are continuing to review company plans for the briney water inside the sinkhole and for surrounding groundwater, another concern of the Police Jury.

Though Texas Brine won't be complying with many of the Police Jury's requests, John Boudreaux, parish homeland security director, said the parish moved to lift the order because the state had found the risk had been mitigated and he has to rely on what scientists tell him.

A few months before the sinkhole appeared, Landry was one of the first people to report bubbling water in the Bayou Corne waterway. The reports prompted a more than two-month mystery as state officials grasped for the cause of the bubbles and later unusual underground tremors in the swamp.

A big clue appeared overnight on Aug. 2-3, 2012, on property Texas Brine was leasing and mining on behalf of Occidental Chemical south La. 70.

An approximately 1-acre watery hole, initially called a "slurry hole" by officials who had refused at first to call it a sinkhole, appeared in the swamp near one of Texas Brine's salt dome mining wells. By the morning of Aug. 3, a pungent oily, earthy flotsam rested on hole's surface with cypress floating vertically in the water only the tree tops visible.

Over time as the hole expanded and became a "sinkhole," a more complete picture emerged. Years of pumping fresh water underground to mine salt from the the Napoleonville Dome, a huge salt deposit, had gotten close to the edge of the deposit, state experts said. The supporting salt wall of the one of those mining cavities gave way and surrounding earth and muck flowed into and started filling the cavern, ultimately creating the sinkhole at the surface.

Oil drilling has happened around salt domes throughout Louisiana for decades, but, in the ongoing litigation over the sinkhole, Texas Brine has blamed past oil drilling around the Napoleonville Dome for weakening the salt wall that failed and sparking a sinkhole.

"The cause of this unprecedented event was not initially known, but based on information exposed during the litigation discovery process, Texas Brine now strongly believes that the sinkhole was not the result of its actions, but was the responsibility of others," the Texas Brine statement said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Four years later last evacaution orders lifted at Bayou Corne sinkhole

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
More than four years since the Bayou Corne sinkhole appeared, Assumption Parish officials declared on Friday that the once growing, burping, oily swampland hole that made worldwide headlines had settled

# data[].attributes.headline
Resource #3 (National Geography Article)

# data[].attributes.subject
Resource #3 (National Geography Article)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Sinkholes are cavities in the ground that form when water erodes an underlying rock layer.

Two types of sinkholes exist. One forms when the roof of a cave collapses and exposes the underground cavern. The second type forms when water dissolves the rock underneath soil and creates an underground chasm. Without rock to support it, the soil layer collapses and creates a hole on the surface.

Sinkholes have both natural and human causes. Land made of a soft underground rock layer, such as rock salt around the Dead Sea or limestone in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, are often riddled with sinkholes, since the rock layer is easily dissolved.

Manmade sinkholes are created when city development compromises the structural integrity of underlying rock. Roads, buildings, and other types of construction may cause water to collect in certain areas and wash away the supporting rock layer (especially at low sea levels and after a heavy rainfall).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Find Out What's Creating These Mysterious Holes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sinkholes are cavities in the ground that form when water erodes an underlying rock layer. Two types of sinkholes exist. One forms when the roof of a cave collapses and exposes the underground cavern. The second type forms when water dissolves the rock underneath soil and creates an underground chasm.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a graph of the corresponding seismic quakes that began to increase after the sinkhole developed in 2012.
https://chrisinmaryville.net/bayou-corne-increased-earthquakes-at-the-sinkhole.html

# data[].attributes.body
Interview with Lt. General Russel Honoré in Bayou Corne, LA.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The sinkhole that led residents to abandon the Louisiana town of Bayou Corne first opened on August 3, 2012, as a "slurry hole" the size of a tennis court. The cave-in announced itself with a massive burp of diesel oil coming from below the earth.

Seven years later, residents I spoke with remember waking to the diesel smell, which gave them headaches and made them vomit. Over the course of the next several years, the hole grew steadily as the ground continued to subside, belching oil and swallowing whole trees like a subterranean monster in a bad science-fiction movie. It became a 40-acre expanse of polluted water, its surface big enough to fit the roof of the New Orleans Superdome four times over. A mile-deep cavern had given way, after decades of industrial salt mining had enlarged it past the point of structural integrity. The odor came from the layer of diesel known as a "fluid blanket" that is routinely used to protect cavern roofs from groundwater erosion - although this cavern failed not at its roof, but far underground.

The sinkhole seems like a parable for the shoddy way that industry has treated Louisiana's fragile wetlands.

The sinkhole's ruthlessness, as it shook the ground and sucked down trees, leaving an oily mess behind, still seems to some observers like a parable for the shoddy way that industry has treated Louisiana's fragile wetlands and the banks of Mississippi River, which over the past century have become one of America's major energy corridors.

"It's what we have allowed for years: manmade pollution and destruction of natural resources in Louisiana," Lt. General Russel Honoré told me. Honoré is well-known throughout the state for having arrived in New Orleans as commander of the U.S. Army's Joint Taskforce Katrina in 2005, when he took charge of a grim and chaotic situation in the city where FEMA's disaster response had lagged badly after the hurricane. In 2012, outraged by what was happening in Bayou Corne, Honoré founded an environmental alliance called the GreenARMY, seeking to address not only the sinkhole but pollution, along with saltwater intrusion caused by the lattice of oil-company canals dug into coastal zones.

According to Honoré, the company that operated the Bayou Corne mine, Texas Brine, should never have begun work; their permit was approved despite an initial determination that the site was risky. "The state of Louisiana told them they didn't have confidence in them drilling there. But they drilled anyway. How can an LLC from Texas find a way around a drilling permit? It goes to show how industry can come to Louisiana and we don't hold them accountable."

Understanding the catastrophe of the sinkhole requires, in turn, an understanding of salt's role in the petrochemical industry. Salt is extracted by injecting high-pressure streams of freshwater into naturally formed dome-shaped deposits. The dissolved salt is brought to the surface as brine and sent by pipeline to processing plants. Brine from Bayou Corne went to the town of Geismar, to one of more than 150 facilities along the 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River known as Cancer Alley. There it was broken down into chlorine and hydrogen gas. Louisiana produces nearly 40 percent of the nation's chlorine, and round-the-clock shifts at other Cancer Alley factories crank out PVC plastic, vinyl, and fertilizer. At night, towering flares and smokestacks are visible for miles - both the pride and the scourge of the state. Photos of this scene have been slapped onto covers of Chamber of Commerce reports about the vigor of local economies, and used in environmental exposés regarding the dangers of industrial air pollution.

Fifteen miles west of the Mississippi, Bayou Corne is peaceful and green, seemingly a world away from heavy manufacturing. No one died here at the sinkhole in the swampland half a mile out of town; no homes were consumed, and - fortunately - contamination hasn't reached the freshwater bayou itself.

Yet the place has witnessed deep environmental loss. When Virginia Hanusik took these photographs, in 2018 and 2019, Bayou Corne had been largely abandoned for years. Tall grass surrounds empty houses and concrete slabs where houses used to sit, and few residents remain to explain how events unfolded. Most left hours after the cave-in was discovered, when Governor Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency and Assumption Parish officials issued an evacuation order for the roughly 159 homes. The sinkhole itself is mostly hidden by cypress swamp. "If someone came back to life and walked back into Bayou Corne, they might wonder what happened to the community," says Mike Schaff, who lived in the hamlet for 25 years, launching his boat from his backyard to fish for bass, perch, alligator garfish, and the sought-after crappie that South Louisiana fishermen call sacalait.

Seven years ago, before the ground gave way, neighbors in Bayou Corne had seen unusual bubbling in the surface of the bayou. In some areas, it looked like a pan of water boiling. In others, the water appeared almost effervescent, "like Alka Seltzer in a drinking glass," Schaff says. Townspeople called state agencies, including the Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Environmental Quality, to report the bubbles, the small sinkholes that developed in backyards, and the tremors they felt as they lay in bed at night.

Schaff recalls that fellow residents made their first reports to authorities in May 2012 - around the time his grandkids were getting out of school. Oil and gas companies checked pressure in the pipelines that run underground here. They found no leaks, and government and industry inspectors chalked up the disturbances to natural phenomena. Though that may seem ridiculous in hindsight, it is not uncommon for methane, or "swamp gas," to bubble up from bayous and lakes.

Townspeople called state agencies to report the bubbles, the small sinkholes that developed in backyards, and the tremors they felt as they lay in bed at night.

It's not clear why there wasn't more scrutiny, early on, of the cavern as a possible source for the bubbling and shaking. Texas Brine's spokesman maintains that he is unable to say exactly how the company responded during the period, because those responses are subject to ongoing litigation; "Texas Brine did not know the cause of the sinkhole," the spokesman told me, "until a very exhaustive multi-year data-collection-and-analysis effort was completed by experts from around the world." In a class-action lawsuit settled in 2014, lawyers for the company argued that the sinkhole was an "unprecedented disaster" because it involved a mid-cavern collapse. (Most collapses occur when the top of a dome falls, which is why roofs are typically coated with diesel.)

Displaced residents believe, however, that the disaster could have been averted if authorities had paid attention to the warning signs, which got more ominous as the summer of 2012 wore on. Neighbors chatting in yards or between boats remember talking about the episode in 2003 in the nearby town of Grand Bayou, when a leak from a ruptured well casing in a salt cavern sent up 30-foot geysers of natural gas and forced an evacuation on Christmas Day. They worried that something similar might be in store for them.

"Here are two communities within a few miles of each other," says Honoré. "And they experience two incidents not many years apart where companies caused a manmade disaster, basically because they were effing around in a salt dome with little oversight."

Grand Bayou and Bayou Corne sit on a salt deposit called the Napoleonville Dome. In sedimentary basins along the Gulf Coast, deep layers of salt deform under geologic pressure and thrust upward in columns through weaker layers above. People around the world have been mining such domes for centuries, at least since the Mughal Empire in the 16th century.

When salt is extracted from a dome's core, a lining of impervious salt crystals is left behind. In Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, some of these hard-walled caverns are used to hold emergency fuel for the federal government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In other caverns, such as the one at Grand Bayou, companies store oil, gas, and other petroleum products, as well as hydrogen and compressed air. The cavern at Bayou Corne was not a petroleum-storage area; it was just a salt mine, though it went down 6000 feet, far deeper than the typical 2000 feet.

People living closest to manmade environmental disasters in Louisiana are often told as little as possible by the companies that cause the problems.

A company named Vulcan Materials opened the site in 1976, and sold it in 2005 to Occidental Chemical, which rechristened the cavern Oxy3. Texas Brine worked under both owners, beginning to drill at Bayou Corne in 1982. They closed Oxy3 in 2011 after it failed to maintain air pressure during a mechanical integrity test - indicating that cavern walls had likely been compromised. This proved right: inside the cavern, a too-thin salt lining gave way to unstable rock behind it. The rock fell, knocking open naturally occurring pockets of oil and gas of the sort that are often trapped next to salt domes. Mud, brine, and crude brewed together under intense subterranean pressures for nearly a year, until locals reported the first tremors - warnings that the mixture was expanding upward.

Even as they lose homes and jobs and endure poor health, people living closest to manmade environmental disasters in Louisiana must frequently rely on hunches or their own observations to understand what's going on, because they are told as little as possible by the companies that cause the problems. In this case, too, as court testimony made clear, administrators knew that Oxy3 had been considered unstable from its early days. In 2018, a state judge found that Texas Brine, along with Vulcan Materials and Occidental Chemical, had ignored warnings about the cavern's instability dating back to 1976, and had put "economic concerns over environmental and safety concerns."

Life changed overnight for those in Bayou Corne. Some returned after the 2012 evacuation only to pack their belongings. Others, like Schaff, flouted the evacuation order and moved back for a while. It was an uneasy period. Beyond worries about sinkhole expansion, Schaff said, there were concerns about the methane released by the collapse, which was infiltrating the shallow aquifer that supplied local drinking water. "If there was gas in the house and you flipped a light switch, it could ignite," he explains. "So those of us who stayed all had gas monitors set to a low level" - to detect even a trace of methane. "That way, you could get out before the house blew up. I kept a suitcase packed, just in case. I wouldn't let my grandkids come over anymore. I couldn't have family reunions at my house either. I didn't want people to come into that situation."

By the time the class-action suit settled in 2014, almost all the residents had moved. Some suits remain pending, but 88 families accepted the settlement; they say little about the terms except that no one got rich. Honoré is more pointed about the lawsuit. "It was an embarrassment," he says. "The lawyers got as much for settling the case as the people who lost their homes." Texas Brine ultimately paid $20.6 million for homes. Still, Honoré argues, prices were far lower than they should have been. "The people who lost their homes were not paid replacement value. They were paid current value, after property values had sunk. Who wanna buy a house next to a sinkhole? A house that was empty because its owners had been evacuated?"

In the 25 years he lived in town, Schaff says, everybody who died suddenly in Bayou Corne died of cancer.

The Louisiana legislature now requires injection drillers to leave a wider margin at salt-cavern perimeters. But other government bodies have hedged the truth about the sinkhole's origins. Subra's organization noted in 2014 that a key DEQ draft document about Bayou Corne repeatedly described the sinkhole as a "manmade disaster area." The phrase appears nowhere in DEQ's final version, however. Texas Brine lobbied successfully to have it removed, alleging that "no definitive cause of the cavern failure had been determined and agreed upon."

Schaff and his neighbors used to spend Mardi Gras morning pulling decorated boats behind their cars in an annual parade they called the Krewe of Hookers, in a bawdy reference to fishing. "My house wasn't much - it was the neighbors that made it special," he tells me. He keeps in touch with those friends on Facebook; in 2015, he too signed his house over to Texas Brine and moved 150 miles north. He's also fighting kidney cancer and a sarcoma in his leg.

In the 25 years he lived in town, Schaff says, everybody who died suddenly in Bayou Corne died of cancer. "We didn't have heart attacks," he says. "It was all cancer. Maybe it was something in the ground. So maybe it wasn't a bad thing for me to move from there."

Places Journal is celebrating ten years online thanks to the support of readers like you.
Please Subscribe or Donate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
When the Ground Gives Way: Photos of Bayou Corne after the Sinkhole

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The sinkhole that led residents to abandon the Louisiana town of Bayou Corne first opened on August 3, 2012, as a "slurry hole" the size of a tennis court. The cave-in announced itself with a massive burp of diesel oil coming from below the earth.

# data[].attributes.body
This study could be taught in a third grade science classroom when focusing on the Biological Evolution: Unity and Diversity unit. This could also be applicable to a cross-cutting concept because third graders focus on Louisiana culture and history in social studies lessons.

# data[].attributes.body
A sinkhole is a large dent in the Earth that appears suddenly and usually without warning. A sinkhole is typically filled with water. Because of the fact that it has no form of drainage whatsoever, the water that fills the sinkhole does not escape, but only grows. In the process, the sinkhole becomes larger. Many times, sinkholes can be seen on busy streets when the ground caves in. It is a phenomenon because it cannot be caused on its own and because of the fact that it grows and "swallows" the surrounding land. This sinkhole was caused by man-made work by an oil company, but the process of the sinkhole forming and expanding was all on its own, without a full explanation.

# data[].attributes.body
3-LS4-4
Performance Expectation: Make a claim about the merit of a solution to a problem caused when the environment changes and the types of plants and animals that live there may change.
DCI: When the environment changes in ways that affect
a place’s physical characteristics, temperature, or
availability of resources, some organisms survive and
reproduce, others move to new locations, yet others
move into the transformed environment, and some die.
(UE.LS2C.a)
BIODIVERSITY AND HUMANS
Populations live in a variety of habitats, and change

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
An Explanination of what caused the Bayou Corne Sinkhole in Louisiana