 I've been finally trusted again with a sponsorship, more about that later on in the video. If I was to describe to you how this lake became virtually empty without photographic proof, you'd think this video was some kind of early April Fools episode. This subject has been on my to cover list and is regularly suggested to me, but I've always put off doing it as I felt that I might not be able to do it justice. You see I find mines impossibly fascinating, in that the amount of engineering skill required to dig into the earth to find rare and raw materials is immense. But unfortunately I've always found it difficult to explain the vastness of the labyrinthine scale of some operations, but I realise that today's disaster actually works to show just how much space even a modest mine takes up. So much space in fact that a drilling accident would inundate the Jefferson Island mine, causing most of the lake to just disappear in 1980. Thus my issue with mining subjects and the Lake Panier disaster seem to have solved themselves. My name is John and welcome to Plainly Difficult. Today we're looking at the Jefferson Island mine inundation, better known as the Lake Panier disaster. It's now time to talk about my sponsor, Private Internet Access VPN. VPNs are pretty much essential nowadays, especially if you value your privacy. PIA are the world's most transparent VPN provider, trusted with over 30 million downloads if they don't record or store user data. But apart from the security aspects, which are pretty important, PIA works with all major streaming sites, which means if you want to watch a show, that's region locked, you can change your location and watch the shows and films you want to your harsh desire. But John, what about if I live in the United States I might hear you say? Well did you know PIA has over 50 servers in 50 states. Need to look like that you're surfing the web from Oklahoma for whatever reason? They've got an IP for that. Do you need to visit a website that can only be accessed within Alaska's borders? They've got an IP address for that too. This is pretty handy for me and my research for this channel. For some reason, some news organisations don't like us Brits going on their websites. Why is this so important? With IP addresses available in all US 50 states, you will avoid sporting event blackouts. If your state's local network pops out of the rights to televise a game, be able to access local websites which are blocked outside of state borders including local news stations and online banking details. Watch television premiers before they show up in your time zone and handily avoid spoilers. Hackers can't see keystrokes or passwords and can't see you accessing work files. If you're doing anything financial online like accessing a government gateway account, checking out your 401k, private pension or a big one online banking, PIA VPN will protect you against hackers trying to look at your internet activity and try and compromise your tasty savings. PIA is available on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and that penguin looking one Linux as well as many other platforms. So how do I sign up? I might hear you asking. Well you can hear at www.piavpn.com slash plainly difficult where you'll get 82% off and 3 months for free as well as a 30 day money back guarantee. Right, back to the video. Background. As is customary on one of my videos, we must set the scene and understand the historical context of today's subject. We start many years before 1980 in 1894 with an actor hiring a contractor to attempt to drill a well near his home in Louisiana. He was called Joseph Jefferson. In his day he was a noted actor and had purchased an island to live on 12 miles west of New Iberia, Iberia Parish along the shore of the freshwater 1300 acre Lake Penier. As an interesting side note, Jefferson was an acquaintance of both actor John Wilkes Booth and the man he killed President Abraham Lincoln. He had built his home around 1870 before his ownership the island had the name of Orange Island. His name was given to the island upon beginning drilling for his new well. His contractors reported discovering rock salt at roughly 300 feet during the summer of 1895. The contractors continued to drill down to a depth of about 2000 feet. Frustratingly, they were still encountering rock salt but this would be a potentially profitable discovery. You see salt is valuable and it was known to exist around the lake. The five islands in the area of which Jefferson was won were actually salt domes with a rock cap. Now the islands aren't actually islands but instead just high spots of land. Jefferson would die in 1905 and just over 10 years later the island would begin to be used for its valuable salt below. In July 1919 two men drilled multiple holes all over the island to map the salt dome. In October of 1919 Jones and Bayless, the men who had investigated the island in June, organised the Jefferson Islands Salt Mining Company. After a failed attempt to dig out a shaft in 1919, the company attempted to dig a second shaft but issues with water ingress would delay the project by another two years. Over the coming years the operation grew of a pillar and chamber method of excavation. This method is very common in the industry and involves mining a grid pattern leaving pillars behind supporting the mines roof. Initially the complex of tunnels were made up of an 800 foot deep level and by the 1930s production had boomed to over 200,000 tons of rock salt per year. The chambers were 90 feet high and 75 feet wide. The mine was extended with a new level a thousand feet deep with an incline in 1940. Instead of chamber and pillar a shrinkage method was used on this level with the salt mined in horizontal slices from bottom to top. The remaining chambers on the 1000 feet level were 100 feet high by 65 feet wide and were lined up below the chambers of the 800 feet level. In 1957 the mine was sold to the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine Company and operations continued increasing production. The mine was extended with a 1300 feet deep level and an air shaft in the early 1960s and in the 1970s a 1500 feet level was added. As the 1970s came to a close the mine had a roughly 290 strong complement of staff. The site worked three eight hours per day seven days a week. The extracted salt was transported away from the lake via barge along the Dow Canberra Canal and the intercoastal waterway. But the Diamond Salt Crystal Mine Company wasn't the only show in town when it came to digging around Lake Penier. And here we are introduced to the other participant in our story and I'm sure you'll probably know the name. Texaco had been exploiting the area's oil and gas reserves as such multiple rigs peppered the land around the lake. But as we all know this is never enough. Texaco was looking to expand operations in the area during the 1980s and the only way to find new oil reserves is to get your drill out. Okay not that type of drill. Texaco acquired a license from the state covering an area encompassing the entire Lake Penier. The company's mode of operation was to contract smaller local drilling outfits to do the labor intensive work with Texaco handling project oversight, well-planning and license acquisition. After it got its license 124 in 1980 Texaco contracted two companies, Wilson Drilling Corporation and Grafton Drilling Co of New Iberia to drill two exploratory wells named P20 and number 35 respectively. Both these wells were located close to the crystal mine with P20 on the lake around 2100 feet from the mine's main shaft entrance and number 35 1200 feet southeast and 400 feet inland from the lake shore. The plan was to drill down to 8000 feet on both wells but although similar depths the wells had a pretty important difference. P20 was on the lake thus needing all support for it to be waterborne. Number 35 was on land so it's much easier to supply via road with trucks. P20's location had been surveyed and staked out in October 1979 and allowable maximum amount of relocation east or west was set to be at 150 feet without any obstruction. The route to the proposed well along the lake bed was dredged and pilings were driven to form the base for the rig in June 1980. Wilson Drilling Corporation in November 1980 began installing their rig at the well site. This installation was called number one. The crews scheduled to work on the new well would do a 12 hour shift followed by 24 hours rest period on land. This was overseen by a tool pusher who lived and worked on the rig for a four day on off rotor. Multiple crews manned the rig on their 12 hour shifts forming 24 hours of constant drilling. This was overseen by a Wilson supervisor who was also then overseen by a Texaco foreman who would do seven days on and seven days off. There were two of them and they made all the most important decisions. By the 18th of November the well was nearly ready to be drilled. A 16 inch conductor pipe had been driven into the lake bed the day before. Drilling begins. Day one of drilling began at 6pm on the 18th of November and was to run for 12 hours to 6am on the 19th. Initially all went well in the first shift. 61 feet per hour was drilled for the first 10 and a half hours. At a depth of just short of 500 feet a survey was made and it was found their work was within one degree of being perfectly vertical. By the next shift book on at 1800 hours on the 19th of November the whole was at around 900 feet deep. With both mud pumps working progress seemed pretty good but not for long. Pump number one's clutch burnt out necessitating drilling operation to slow right down. At around 1090 feet another survey was undertaken and it was found to be 0.5 degrees off vertical. At 1248 feet the rig would encounter another problem. Their drill had become stuck. Just before 5am the Texaco drill foreman was woken up and the issue with the drill was reported to him. The crew tried to rotate, lift and drop the drill but no movement was seen. The foreman told the crew to increase the thickness of the mud. As a side note drilling mud helps with drilling efforts and also helps to remove the drilled material from the hole. By now both pumps were working again and they pumped the thicker mud which then increased the pressure on the hole. The load indicator started to show a heavier weight than the 78,000 pounds on the drill bit. It climbed to 240,000 pounds. The wire on the drill bit was sacked off dropping it to a much more acceptable 40,000 pounds. This relief was short lived as the weight climbed again to over 100,000 pounds. The next crew took over at 545 and not long after a rather worrying sound rumbled from the rig. Much to the confusion of the crew the weight of the drill bit rose further to a massive 400,000 pounds aka the weight of donuts I would like to eat in one go. The confusion would move over to worry as the rig began to tilt. Texaco and the drill company, Wilsons, were notified of the now bizarre situation. Both companies decided on an attempt to level the rig. Apparently it's not uncommon for the pilings to slip thus making a platform uneven. The rig continued to lean. Seeing this as definitely not normal the foreman ordered all crew to abandon the platform. The crew cut loose the barges that were moored to the rig in an effort to try and save the equipment aboard. At roughly 7.25 in the morning the rig overturned and began to sink. Eyewitnesses were shocked to see the rig completely disappear below the waterline. Something that shouldn't have even been possible. As a lake at its deepest point was only around 12 feet. Well where do you think it might have gone? The mine inundation. Whilst the leaning rig was being abandoned miners at the crystal salt mine were just beginning their shift. Obviously they didn't know about the impending disaster that would interfere with their plans for the day. 48 workers were on site and leading up to 8am they were spreading out amongst the various levels of the mine. On the 1,300 foot level worker Junius Gadison was collecting electrical equipment. He noticed something that no one in a mine wants to see. A 2 foot high torrent of water approaching him. He raised the alarm and evacuation of the mine began with men being hoisted to the surface in the lift. Wilford Johnson on the 1,500 foot level went up to the 1,300 foot level to investigate the water but was soon forced to escape by the ever increasing deluge. The evacuation went pretty smoothly with one of the 4 men using a pickup truck to pick up workers in the deeper more extreme regions of the mine. By 9 o'clock in the morning everyone was clear. It was an absolute miracle that no one in the mine or the rig lost their lives. Although no one was lost a whole lake was having a go at trying to disappear though. A quarter mile wide whirlpool formed over the rough location where the rig was. It sucked a tugboat, a string of barges and two Texaco oil rigs into the abyss of water. Two boaters on the lake managed to power their boats to shore just showing again the sheer luck of everyone involved. Over the next three hours the entire lake disappeared into the mine. Usually the lake fed the Dalcambra Canal to the Vermilion Bay eventually heading out to the Gulf of Mexico. But during the disaster the flow was reversed taking water from the sea and filling back into the lake and this went on for several days. The air shaft became a mud cannon as water pushed out all the air from the mine showering the surrounding area with thick muddy water. Nearby residents were evacuated and personnel from the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Office, the Louisiana State Police, the Vermilion Parish Sheriff's Office, Dalcambra Police and the State Wildlife and Fisheries Department was drafted in to help with a growing amount of people becoming displaced. Eventually the water pressure would equalize and of the 11 barges that had disappeared into the whirlpool seven returned to the surface. As an interesting side effect the silk content of the lake actually increased but not from the mine but actually the backfilling of seawater from the Gulf. This would also change the local ecosystem. Aftermath Although no one died three dogs were reported killed but the big question was how did a well-established mine get breached by a pretty well-established drilling company? Clearly something went wrong. We can likely rule out coincidence as the drill on the rig got stuck between 1200 and 1300 feet deep. Funny enough it was the 1300 foot level of the mine that failed. The timeline of the rig sinking and the inundation also pretty match up fairly closely. Clearly this points that the two events were actually won. Interestingly the mine had been suffering subsidence for at least 10 years leading up to the inundation. The instability of the mine was being actively monitored. Assuming the maps were correct and Texaco was drilling in the correct location disaster still could have resulted because you don't even need to physically pierce the mine. Just weakening an area around it is enough to cause structural failure. Like if you went to the beach and tried to dig a hole in the wet sands besides just keep on crumbling. The 1981 report into the incident did stop short of giving the actual cause mainly due to all the evidence being sucked into a massive hole. But subsequent information hints that Texaco had misread the charts taking the transverse Mercator projection coordinates for universal transverse Mercator coordinates. Understandable we've all been there. This seems the likely cause as they were not expecting to have to dig into the salt dome. Which was the same thing the drill bit got lodged into. Although no official blame was put on Texaco we can guess this was the widely accepted cause as the company would be the one to stick their hands in their pocket. And they must have been deeper pockets than mine as contractor Wilson Brothers and Texaco paid out $32 million to the crystal salt mining company as well as a further $14 million to a local botanical garden. Which was also damaged in the inundation. Where you would get 82% off plus 3 months for free and a 30 day money back guarantee. Signing up via the link really helps out the channel as well as your internet browsing delights. Well this was refreshing doing a video with no mass loss of human life. But never fear next week we will be back to our usual programming of death and destruction. This is a plain difficult production. All videos on the channel are created commons attribution share alike license. Plain difficult videos are produced by me John in a currently warm southern corner of London UK. I'd like to thank my patrons and YouTube members for this financial support and also if you'd like to see hints and photographs of future videos then you can by checking me out on Twitter. And all that's left to say is Mr Music Man, play us out please.