On November 20, 1980, Lake Peigneur in Louisiana was a 10 foot deep freshwater fishing lake. Two days later, it was a 200 foot deep salt water lake, all because of a simple miscalculation and a small 14 inch wide drill bit. How did something small change the landscape of Louisiana forever?
Deep underground Lake Peigneur were large deposits of salt. Mining companies, employing many local citizens, extracted the salt. These large mining shafts were hundreds of feet underground and ran parallel to the earth’s surface above. Some of the salt deposits were estimated to be larger than Mount Everest. But salt wasn’t the only valuable commodity lying underground. Studies showed that oil was likely hiding nearby the massive salt deposits.
No wonder Texaco started exploratory drilling. In order to drill to the correct depth, however, they needed to ensure that their drilling did not meet the underground salt mine shafts. A slight miscalculation in a triangulation technique, however, would prove disastrous for the community. After the 14 inch drill bit punctured the roof of one of the salt mines below, the oil workers noticed abandoned the drilling platform and within minutes saw their 150 foot oil rig disappear into the 10 foot lake. But this was just the beginning.
The swirling vortex created from the gravity sucking the entire lake hundreds of feet below was so powerful that is sucked below eleven fully loaded barges, a tugboat, at 65 acres of the surrounding terrain. After the lake drained, the Delcambre canal, which normally flowed away from the lake, reversed direction because of the intense suction. It’s the only time water ever flowed north from the Gulf of Mexico and resulted in a 164 foot waterfall as it emptied into the newly sunken lake bed, the tallest waterfall in Louisiana’s history.
After two days of refilling the new lake, nine of the eleven barges popped up like corks, the lake’s depth changed from 10 feet to 200 feet, and because of the backflow from the Delcambre Canal, the lake changed from freshwater to saltwater. All from a small miscalculation and small drill bit.
Many times we think of change as big, momentous occurrences and we overlook and do not give the necessary credit to the little things that make the big things happen. However we perceive the change and what caused it, the new landscape of the change gives new perspective on the challenges and opportunities that await.
“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” – Vincent Van Gogh
“A man’s mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.