On November 20, 1980, Wilson Brothers oil drilling was roaring over Lake Pinel in southern Louisiana, 1.2 miles (1.9 kilometers) north of Del Camber, Louisiana. With a total area of 2.55 square kilometers and an average depth of about 3 meters, Lake Pinel has always been a favorite sports spot for fishing and water sports enthusiasts, but Texaco Petroleum plans to develop the oil here.
Geologists believe that prehistoric sedimentary basins from southern Luzhou to the Gulf of Mexico are potentially oil-rich, and Lake Pinel is less than 20 kilometers from the Gulf of Mexico, so Texaco Oil Company also wanted to try its luck on Lake Pinel, and wilson brothers drilling undertook this drilling mission!
However, unlike other lakes, there is an ancient salt lake under the bottom of Lake Peniere tens of meters deep, after the evaporation of water, a large amount of salt layer is left by geological movement to form a rock salt mine, diamond crystal salt company developed this salt mine, the annual mining volume of up to 100,000 tons, for the company to bring huge profits. Meanwhile, more than 50 miners at Diamond Crystal Salt are working day and night in the salt mines to mine rock salt.
Drilling on salt mines? Is this Wilson Brothers really deadly? Don't worry, the drilling is still a few kilometers from the lake above the salt mine. At 4:30 a.m., the roaring rig sound came to an abrupt halt at a depth of 1,300 feet (396 mi) after a muffled hissing sound, and the experienced drillers reacted immediately, and the 36 cm diameter drill bit should have been stuck! According to normal operation, reversing the car, and then starting the drill again after a little lifting, the yawning workers quickly returned to their previous busy appearance and threw themselves into intense work.
But in the process of lifting the drill, there were several loud noises under the water, and it seemed to be drilled into hell! Osiris, the king of the underworld, is roaring! The drilling platform under the workers' feet soon began to tilt, and everyone quickly jumped on the barge next to the platform, decisively withdrew from the high-value platform, and returned to the shore to watch the drilling slowly dump in the lake.
At this time, the workers of the Diamond Crystal Salt Company, hundreds of meters deep under the lake, were working feverishly, and several workers suddenly heard strange sounds coming from the tunnel in the distance, which seemed to be the sound of various empty barrels placed in the tunnel colliding together, and there was also a louder and louder sound of water, and the experienced workers keenly felt the danger, and the salt mine was a big lake overhead, it must be permeable!
The well-trained workers were summoned by the emergency evacuation signal of the exercise, and one after another successfully lifted the well from the well, and when the last team of workers evacuated, the distant tunnel collapsed, and the raging lake water instantly filled the tunnel underground, but the underground personnel had all been evacuated. The drillers who were now withdrawing from the drilling and on the shore looked at the lake in amazement as a huge whirlpool was formed where the well was dumped.
Because the drilling "successfully" drilled into the shaft of the salt mine, the position was in the salt dome of the third layer of the diamond crystal salt mine, the extremely high water pressure at a depth of hundreds of meters directly broke through the gap between the drill bit and the cave wall and injected into the salt mine below, the salt met the water quickly dissolved, the cave wall expanded rapidly, in the process of drilling the bit, the salt mine dome partially collapsed, making a huge noise, and the driller heard the loud noise emitted by this collapse.
The water of the lake quickly injected into the salt mine from this direct "pipe" of nearly 40 centimeters, and as the current washed away, it rapidly expanded by several meters, and then began to collapse, and a whirlpool had begun to appear on the surface of the lake, and the swirling lake water brought everything floating on the surface of the lake to the center of the whirlpool, and the lake water was becoming shallower, the shore of the lake also collapsed into the lake, and the boats moored by the lake were pushed to the center of the whirlpool.
Eleven barges on the lake, several makeshift houses along the shore, as well as a tugboat and a large grove of trees were engulfed, and in just three hours, the 3.5 billion gallons (13.2 billion liters) of water disappeared, leaving only a large hole in the original drilling hole in the entire lake.
The Gulf of Mexico is flooded with water, and freshwater lakes become saltwater lakes
Is it over? Far from it! Because Lake Pinel has a Canal del Cambre leading to Vermilien Bay, and further out is the Gulf of Mexico, after the water of Lake Pinel disappeared, the canal that was supposed to inject fresh water into Vermilion Bay began to flow backwards, at first because the outlet of the lake was relatively high, the water flow was not large, but with the collapse of the shore of Lake Pinel also affected the side of the canal.
Eventually, the shore of the canal's mouth flowed backwards into the lake, forming a waterfall with a drop of 164 feet (50 meters), which unexpectedly became the highest waterfall ever in Luzhou, and the inverted canal flowed for nearly 2 days to fill this "new" Pinel Lake.
The final "climax" moment came, when the moment of filling was about to be filled, the high-pressure gas compressed by the lake water in the salt mine rushed back to the mouth of the cave, throwing the drilling platform, barges and a large amount of debris stuck in the lake at the mouth of the cave high and rushing back to the lake, forming a 400-foot (120 m) high fountain, which lasted for a long time before slowly subsiding.
The new Pinel Lake is 200 feet (60 meters) deeper, and the lake surface is much larger than the original, and the freshwater lake has become a brackish water lake, and the salt in the water does not come from the salt mines at the bottom of the lake, but from the seawater of Vermilion Bay, which is diluted by fresh water to form a strange "saltwater lake".
It is a miracle that there were no casualties in this accident, but it is reported that 3 onlookers fell into the lake with the collapsed lakeshore and disappeared, but no one remembers how desperate the fish lost in the tunnels of the salt mine at the bottom of the lake were, perhaps millions of years later when humans dug it out of the salt mine, how can there be fish fossils in the rock salt mine, can prehistoric fish survive in such a high salinity lake water?
How can a well built according to the drawings drill through the salt mine?
Texas Oil Company, also known as Texas Oil Company, was founded in 1901 as one of the largest oil companies in the United States, and in the 1980s, at the peak of louisiana's oil exploration, Texas Oil Company obtained the right to explore the Pinel Lake area.
Wilson Brothers, the drilling contractor for Lake Pinel Drilling, got the exploration drawings from Texaco Petroleum and positioned the construction according to the diagram, how could it be wrong? According to the published investigation data, Wilson Brothers mistakenly used the projection method when it converted the drawings it obtained into construction positioning marker drawings.
Originally, it was supposed to be calculated using the transverse Mercator projection coordinate system, but the company used the universal transverse Mercator projection coordinate system coordinates, which looked only two words apart and looked similar (especially for small-scale maps, there was almost no difference), but the farther away from the equator, the greater the error.
Universal transverse Mercator projection
Universal transverse axis Mercator projection of the global map, the world in a rectangular map, look very pleasing to the eye, it is estimated that many friends are accustomed to this kind of painting, after all, Fangzheng are used to seeing, but this map and the actual difference is very large, especially the deformation of high latitude areas is very large.
Transverse Mercator projection
The Earth is a rough sphere, so the map that pulls it into a rectangle will later become a two-pointed spindle strip, and if it is mixed with the same transverse Mercator projection, the higher the latitude, the greater the difference, and in the Area of Lake Pinel at latitude 29.981°, this error offset will reach hundreds of meters.
Therefore, it should have been drilled in a safe area thousands of meters away from the salt mine, and the result was that the coordinate system was wrong, and the drill was directly above the salt mine, fortunately, there was no immediate collapse after drilling through the salt mine, but first permeable, expanded and then collapsed, this time allowed the workers of the Diamond Crystal Salt Company below to have a time to escape, otherwise more than 50 underground workers were trapped That must be a super disaster.
It is said that Junius Gaddison, the electrician under the diamond crystal salt company at the time, made a great contribution, when he was in the tunnel suddenly heard a loud noise, and then heard the sound of the flood roaring, he immediately sounded the alarm, according to the agreed escape signal: the mine's wait flashed three times, all 50 workers received the alarm, immediately gathered to the elevator of the rising shaft, 8 people in one time, and successfully ascended the well many times in a row.
When the last group of people went up the elevator, their bodies were already soaked by the lake, but it was gratifying that all of them managed to escape, and in the process, there was no doubt that the timely alarm of the electrician Junius Cadison and the orderly escape of the absentees were closely linked.
Hapless Texaco Oil and drilling contractor Wilson Brothers paid $32 million to the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine and $12.8 million to Live Oak Gardens, a nearby plant nursery, in an out-of-court settlement. Eventually the salt mine was abandoned altogether.