 Today's story begins early morning on November the 20th, 1980. Lake Pena in Louisiana, America was a particularly unexciting freshwater lake. It was only about nine feet deep. It was absolutely still like a giant swimming pool. In the middle of it, it had a huge drilling platform, an oil rig, and parked alongside were 11 massive barges. But suddenly on the morning in question, the drilling platform begins to shake and not to shake. It is swaying crazily from side to side. The men can't control it. So they just abandon it. They move to shore as fast as they can and not a moment to soon because all hell breaks loose. Apparently the drill had gone through the floor of the lake. But under the lake was a centuries old 400 meter deep salt mine. And so the water from the lake now starts getting sucked into that hole. And in no time at all, the 14 inch hole that the rig had made had turned into a ferocious whirlpool, which was a quarter of a mile wide and with so much force that within minutes, it had sucked the whole lake dry. Everything that was on the lake, the drilling platform, all the 11 barges that were parked out there, 65 acres of land from around the lake, it had all just disappeared down that hole before you knew what was happening, along with the 3,000 billion tons of water. The lake had just emptied. But this is only what was happening on top. The salt mine below was a working mine and there were 50 workers down there. Now the roof of the mine had for centuries been supported on these massive pillars made of rock salt. But the moment the water touches them, the pillars dissolve. So the roof starts to cave in. The floor of the mine has started to flood. The men are trapped over there. There is a lift, but it is 200 feet higher than where they're working and they can't get to it because everything is submerged. Eventually the miners managed to climb the side of the mine walls to get to the lift, but there is only one lift and it can only take 8 people at a time and it is very, very slow. The water on the other hand is filling up very fast. Long story short, by some miracle all the miners managed to get out of there safely, but up above on the ground, there is yet more drama happening. See, the lake used to drain into the Gulf of Mexico via canal, but now that it's become empty, this has reversed the tidal flow so that water is now rushing back in through the canal into the empty lake bed. But because the lake bed has dropped, this creates a massive waterfall, 164 foot drop waterfall. And the problem is that on the floor of the lake, there had been a pipe carrying natural gas and under all this pressure, the pipe bursts and a wall of fire shoots out, which apparently was so high that air traffic had to be diverted because of fears of explosions. You know, people who had watched this said that it felt like they were watching the end of the world. Eventually everything had settled down and the lake had filled up again, but you know what? By 22nd November, which was only two days later, this 9 foot deep freshwater boring lake had turned into a 400 meter deep saltwater lake in just two days. And the moral of the story, we need to stop messing with nature.