La. 'Sinkhole' is a Salt Dome Collapse

A mislabeled as a “sinkhole” in the Bayou Corne/Grand Bayou area of Assumption Parish is actually a salt dome collapse, engulfing the same area of Louisiana’s largest earthquake in history, now crisscrossed with pipelines carrying dangerous chemicals, where drilling continues and locals succumb to the once rich Cajun cultural area becoming a national sacrifice zone.

Attention is generally focused on the Texas Brine cavern inside the Magnolia Gas Storage Facility, that is in the 1-mile by 3-mile Napoleonville Salt Dome below the south Louisiana Cajun communities there.

Less attention is given to the fact that the outer edge of the Magnolia Gas Storage Facility in the Napoleonville Salt Dome is gone, “fracked-out”, according to key geologist working on the “Bayou Corne sinkhole disaster” response team, who broke that news in late October at a Resident Briefing meeting in Pierre Part.

Dr. Gary Hecox, geologist and technical advisor with the former Shaw Environmental Group, now called CB&I Shaw, contracted by the state of Louisiana, told Assumption Parish residents, including its energy refugees, that the outer edge of the Napoleonville Salt Dome is gone.

The massive dome collapsed near the breached cavern that is on edge of the Bayou Corne “sinkhole.“

Officials worldwide agree that the Napoleonville Salt Dome collapse is a historic event globally due to the oil and gas spewing from it. No other “sinkhole” has ever had the oil and gas factor. Experts have never been confronted with a disaster of this nature.

The collapse involves Napoleonville Salt Dome facility, after Louisiana’s largest quake in history occurred right there in Napoleonville. It began about two years after BP wrecked MC-252, the Macondo Well site that resulted in uncontrolled crude and methane gushing, that still spew and continue to be covered up by national media.

The Napoleonville Salt Dome facility holds about 50 caverns, primarily used by the oil and gas industry for storage. It is beneath the Bayou Corne and Grand Bayou, and those adjacent Cajun communities. The “sinkhole” is located between the two bayous and just off Hwy. 70. The state is now working on developing a new highway in case the collapsing area consumes that highway.

Seven companies lease some 50 underground caverns in the salt dome:

• Texas Brine
• Chevron
• CrossTex
• Dow
• Pro Mix
• Acadian
• PB Energy

The state blames Texas Brine LLC for the disastrous crude leaking, explosive methane lurking in waters and underground, and thousands of earthquakes since May 2012.

In a “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” dispute, scientists maintain that the company caused the seismic activity and the company says the seismic activity caused its cavern to fail.

Most scientists agree that one of Texas Brine’s two caverns failed. Texas Brine has contended its cavern failed due to loss of integrity elsewhere in the dome from seismic activity.

Amid beginnings of the Louisiana declared state of emergency, it was learned, much to dismay of some officials, that other state officials had quietly authorized Texas Brine to store radioactive material in one of its caverns. The company claims it did not store the radioactive material, NORM, there, but instead, stored it in frack tanks on its leased property right near the “sinkhole.”

Head of Louisiana’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) at the time of that authorization, Scott Angelle, promptly resigned when that dirty secret was uncovered in a news report. Gov. Bobby Jindal promptly rewarded Angelle with an appointment to another high-paying position, member of the LSU Board of Supervisors.

Since then, Stephen Chustz has headed the DNR, the key person responsible for managing the collapsing part of Assumption Parish. 

“Yeah, the outer edge of the salt dome, best we can tell, is gone,” Hecox told a few hundred residents in October in Pierre Part at St. Joseph the Worker Catholic Church hall.

The sinkhole, above the outer edge of the salt dome, was then the size of five football fields. The ground had begun breaking up in areas far from it, according to official Assumption Parish flyover videos.

The breached part of the massive dome was near Texas Brine’s failed storage cavern, according to Hecox.

Watch: Geologist Dr. Gary Hecox breaks news to Bayou Corne sinkhole disaster area locals that the Napoleonville Salt Dome outer edge collapsed in a ‘frack out”

DNR’s civil engineer Chris Knotts explained at an earlier resident meeting that, if the cavern was fractured, there was little chance of repairing it.

The cavern is fractured.

Salt dome fracked-out collapse

Dr. Hecox explained the problem was that the salt dome had a “frack-out.”

Methane has now been leaking there nine months, since May when locals first began reporting the gas bubbling in their beloved Bayou Corne and Grand Bayou to officials. 

“There’s a lot of gas venting off at the sinkhole, Hecox said in October.

“We are reasonably confident the gas is coming from below the deeper formations,” he said.

Hecox said the frack-out “probably happened in a matter of seconds.”

“The pressure of the brine got so much, essentially you had a fracking out of the brine going all the way up to the surface,” he said. “That’s why you have a collapse and fracturing all the way to the surface.”

“It went right on the side of the salt dome because that’s where the rocks in the formation are the weakest.”

“The rocks coming down were increasing the pressure in the brine until the frack-out.”

Asked if the information he was providing was an educated guess, Hecox, with 30 years of experience, said, “I would have to agree with that.”

Officials expect the sinkhole to continue to expand. Some have said it could grow to the size of 30 football fields.

The locals not evacuated live in daily fear of a methane gas explosion and nightly fear that they will take their last breath in the hungry sinkhole monster.

“There’s a lot of gas venting off at the sinkhole,” Hecox said, after which he gave is honest disclosure, “Where all this leads, we don’t know.”

Since then, despite fingerpinting the crude oil being spewed from the disaster area, no company has been identified with the fingerprinting.

What has been disclosed is that BP might have not only ruptured the Gulf floor in its catastrophic Deepwater Horizon deep sea drilling at nearly unprecedented depths, resulting in the methane explosion initially killing eleven workers. There is also speculation that BP ruptured the ocean floor and created a new fault line.

Salt domes are on fault lines, as recently explained by this author. The Gulf fault system is less than 90 miles from the Napoleonville Salt Dome. It is also near Louisiana’s Lake Peigneur salt dome, that already experienced a catastrophe in 1980, sucking huge barges into it and destroying the lives of locals. It, too, now bubbles more than ever.

In a victory for Lake Peigneur and other south Louisiana rights defenders, in light of the Bayou Corne sinkhole collapsing salt dome disaster, in mid-February, Louisiana’s DNR Office of Conservation issued a new order for all of the state’s 34 salt dome operators.

Is the entire span of Louisiana salt domes on fault lines now at greater risk of crude carcinogens and methane exploding?

The new directive ordered all salt dome operators to show how close their oil and gas industry storage caverns are to outer edges of the subterranean salt domes, and also to prove that caverns closest to the salt dome edges are structurally sound.

The so-called Louisiana “sinkhole” is far more extensive than any other sinkhole in history. There is little “natural” about it. It is a collapsing salt dome. To date, there is no hope given for turning it back.

Photo Credit: Louisiana Delta

Copyright 2013 Deborah Dupré

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Human Rights news reporter Deborah Dupré is author of “Vampire of Macondo, Life, crimes and curses in south Louisiana that Powerful Forces Don’t want you to know,” 450 pages packed with mainstream media’s censored stories about the BP-wrecked Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico that continues catastrophic human and environmental devastation. 

Follow Dupré on Twitter @DeborahDupre. For interviews, email [email protected].