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UV,

Just wached a documentry on the 1980 Lake Peigneur incident... History Channel Engineering Disasters 5 - Pretty intriguing to say the least.

YouTube footage:
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Ya know out of all the stuff man has built over the centuries, I think our record is pretty good.

But it does make the old saying, measure twice, drill once sound good.

i cut it 3 times and its still to short

patrick....what amazed me the most was that it took two days to fill the mine .....

measure twice, drill once

With the drilling technologies in 1980, especially the slipstick methods of plotting a hole, it's a wonder they could find their ass with both hands...

"Let's see.... if we line up the barge between that tree and that building, and that old abandoned car over there, and get the platform vertical aligned to 90º +/- 2º, and sink 500' of pipe, we ought'a be purty close to oil. Never mind that there's a salt mine within 50 or so yards... Ya' think we should ask 'em salt guys to see a layout of the mine? Naw, we got plenty of room... They're a bunch of dicks anyway."

I was in the Banking business then and had loaned money on three of the barges and the tug boat. Barges popped back up but not the tug. A few years later they closed and flooded Belle Isle salt mine near Morgan City, La. to prevent this from happening again.

Capt. Pat.

In 1999 I worked on a project at Rend Lake in Illinois; we were hired to locate abandoned exploratory coal drill holes from the 40s and 50s that were done before the USACOE built the dam to create Rend Lake. Console Coal was advancing mine shafts 150 feet under the lake and there was a serious fear that if the mine hit one of these old bore holes another Lake Peigneur could happen. We had old topo maps that showed the locations of the test holes (Not a lot of good when you are floating on the surface of a lake), we would position a jack up barge with a drill rig over the approximate location then send divers down to locate the old drill pipe after locating it we would redrill the hole to a depth of 260 feet and then plug the hole and re-cap the old stem or in some cases drive a new stem pipe and cap it.

I remember going to a meeting with the USACOE and Consol before work had started one of the Consol engineers laid out an overlay drawing of the advancing mine shafts and their proximity to the old drill holes. several of the mine shafts were within 250 feet of holes. We were directed to focus on these holes first because they were getting some high volumes of water infiltration in the advancing shafts.

The USACOE engineer sat bolt upright in his chair and said could you please repeat your last statement. All hell broke loose as he started in on the Mine Superintendent about the dangers of draining a 15,000 acre lake. Of course $ were king and Consol did not want to slow production so they upped our contract value for an expedited mobilization to the site and offered a production bonus for plugging 14 of the 60 drill holes in 30 days.

The Corps later brought in footage of the Lake Peigneur disaster to show the Console managers and us what could happen. It was a sobering meeting and afterwards it was decided by Console that it would be best if the footage was restricted to management level personnel at the mine.

I do recall that the USACOE sent a survey team out to double check our position when we were drilling the 14 holes that were close to the mine shafts

Clay,

Absolutely cool! Draining a 15,000 acre lake into a coal mine would've made Peigneur look like a minor problem...

Thanks for the personal tale of a disaster diverted.

Br,

Patrick

I'd like to have seen the look on their faces when they saw that!! And restrict access to the video to management!! I bet those miners wouldn't have gone back in the shaft if they saw it! I know I wouldn't have!

Wow, that is tragic!