Meet
the Town That's Being Swallowed by a Sinkhole
7
August, 2013
ABOUT
ONCE A MONTH, the residents of Bayou Corne, Louisiana, meet at the
Assumption Parish library in the early evening to talk about the hole
in their lives. "It was just like going through cancer all over
again," says one. "You fight and you fight and you fight
and you think, 'Doggone it, I've beaten this thing,' and then it's
back." Another spent last Thanksgiving at a 24-hour washateria
because she and her disabled husband had nowhere else to go. As the
box of tissues circulates, a third woman confesses that after 20
years of sobriety she recently testified at a public meeting under
the influence.
"The
God of my understanding says, 'As you sow, so shall you reap,'"
says Kenny Simoneaux, a balding man in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt. He
has instructed his grandchildren to lock up the ammunition. "I'm
so goddamn mad I could kill somebody."
But
the support group isn't for addiction, PTSD, or cancer, though all of
these maladies are present. The hole in their lives is a literal one.
One night in August 2012, after months of unexplained seismic
activity and mysterious bubbling on the bayou, a sinkhole opened up
on a plot of land leased by the petrochemical company Texas Brine,
forcing an immediate evacuation of Bayou Corne's 350 residents—an
exodus that still has no end in sight. Last week, Louisiana filed a
lawsuit against the company and the principal landowner, Occidental
Chemical Corporation, for damages stemming from the cavern collapse.
Texas
Brine's operation sits atop a three-mile-wide, mile-plus-deep salt
deposit known as the Napoleonville Dome, which is sheathed by a layer
of oil and natural gas, a common feature of the salt domes prevalent
in Gulf Coast states. The company specializes in a process known as
injection mining, and it had sunk a series of wells deep into the
salt dome, flushing them out with high-pressure streams of freshwater
and pumping the resulting saltwater to the surface. From there, the
brine is piped and trucked to refineries along the Mississippi River
and broken down into sodium hydroxide and chlorine for use in
manufacturing everything from paper to medical supplies.
What
happened in Bayou Corne, as near as anyone can tell, is that one of
the salt caverns Texas Brine hollowed out—a mine dubbed
Oxy3—collapsed. The sinkhole initially spanned about an acre. Today
it covers more than 24 acres and is an estimated 750 feet deep. It
subsists on a diet of swamp life and cypress trees, which it
occasionally swallows whole. It celebrated its first birthday
recently, and like most one-year-olds, it is both growing and prone
to uncontrollable burps, in which a noxious brew of crude oil and
rotten debris bubbles to the surface. But the biggest danger is
invisible; the collapse unlocked tens of millions of cubic feet of
explosive gases, which have seeped into the aquifer and wafted up to
the community. The town blames the regulators. The regulators blame
Texas Brine. Texas Brine blames some other company, or maybe the
regulators, or maybe just God.
Bayou
Corne is the biggest ongoing industrial disaster in the United States
you haven't heard of. In addition to creating a massive sinkhole, it
has unearthed an uncomfortable truth: Modern mining and drilling
techniques are disturbing the geological order in ways that
scientists still don't fully understand. Humans have been extracting
natural resources from the earth since the dawn of mankind, but never
before at the rate and magnitude of today's petrochemical industry.
And the side effects are becoming clear. It's not just sinkholes and
town-clearing natural gas leaks: Recently, the drilling process known
as fracking has been linked to an increased risk of earthquakes.
"When
you keep drilling over and over and over again, whether it's into
bedrock or into salt caverns, at some point you have fractured the
integrity of this underground structure enough that something is in
danger of collapsing," observes ecologist and author Sandra
Steingraber, whose work has focused on fracking and injection wells.
"It's an inherently dangerous situation."
The
sinkhole forced the entire town of Bayou Corne to evacuate. Jerry
Dubinsky for Leanweb.org/LMRK.org
The
domes are not just harvested for their salt. Over the last 60 years,
in the Gulf Coast—and to a lesser extent in Kansas, Michigan, and
New York—industry has increasingly used the sprawling caverns that
result from injection mining as a handy place to store things—namely
crude oil, pressurized gases, and even radioactive materials. The
federal government considers salt tombs in Louisiana and Texas ideal
for the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The hundreds of salt caverns
that honeycomb the substrata, as companies like Texas Brine take
pains to point out, are mostly safe, most of the time. But when
something goes wrong, the results are disastrous—sometimes spelling
the end for nearby communities. The dangers are myriad, from
sinkholes to natural gas explosions to toxic-fume releases. Salt
caverns account for just 7 percent of all natural gas storage
facilities in the United States (although that number is increasing)
but 100 percent of all major accidents, according to one industry
analyst.
Bayou
Corne residents need only drive a quarter mile down Highway 70 to see
the worst-case scenario. On Christmas Day 2003, a methane leak from a
Napoleonville Dome salt cavern storing natural gas forced residents
of Grand Bayou, a neighboring hamlet, to evacuate. Dow Chemical,
which owned the cavern, bought out the mostly elderly residents,
leaving only concrete slabs behind. In places like Barbers Hill,
Texas, similar leaks have turned once-thriving neighborhoods into
ghost towns. A 2001 cavern leak in Hutchinson, Kansas, spewed
30-foot-tall geysers of gas and water and caused an explosion that
left two people dead.
"I
hate to say, but it's not an unusual event," says Robert
Traylor, a geologist at the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state's
oil and gas regulator. "These things happen. In the oil
business, a million things can go wrong, and they usually go wrong."
But
disasters like the one in Bayou Corne have done little to slow the
growth of injection mining. Last spring, lawmakers in Baton Rouge
pushed through a handful of modest reforms in response to the
sinkhole, but the toughest regulations were knocked down by the
chemical industry. New caverns continue to be permitted. It's not a
question of whether there will be another Bayou Corne—but where,
and how big.
ON
A SCORCHING JUNE morning, I board a Cessna to survey the sinkhole. My
45-mile flight passes through the heart of southern Louisiana's
industrial jungle, a continuous series of pipelines and processing
plants that line the Mississippi as it twists like a busted-up slinky
toward the gulf. The smoking skyline gives way to a checkered ribbon
of cane and soybean fields and at last to the swampy interior of
Assumption Parish.
You
notice the booms first, bright yellow plastic rolls designed to trap
the oil and brine that collect on the surface and prevent them from
seeping into the surrounding waterways. A grove of cypress trees has
been stripped bare and sits gray and rotting. At 500 feet, the air is
thick with the smell of crude, and the water has a rainbow sheen; in
the last few hours, the sinkhole has burped again, and workers are
scurrying to contain the new release.
The
Acadians—the French Canadian refugees who settled here in the
1700s—were drawn to the bayous by their bounty of gators and
crawdads and spoonbills. Petrochemical giants came for other reasons:
the chemicals in the salt domes and the oil and gas reserves that
surround them. Gas and brine pipelines cross over and under the town
and its surrounding swamps, carving up the basin into a web of rights
of way for companies including Chevron, Dow, Crosstex, and Florida
Gas.
Texas
Brine's Oxy3 cavern, one of 53 in the Napoleonville Dome and one of
six operated by the company, is more than a mile below the surface.
At that depth, 3-D seismic mapping is both time-consuming and
expensive, and as a consequence, injection-mining companies often
have only a foggy—and outdated—idea of what their mines really
look like. "Everybody wants to do it within a certain budget and
a certain time frame," explains Jim LaMoreaux, a
hydrologist who organizes an annual conference on salt-cavern-caused
sinkholes. In some cases, he says, it's possible that companies cut
corners and fail to commission the proper studies.
Texas
Brine's first and last mapping project was in 1982, and by the
company's own admission, it understated Oxy3's proximity to the edge
of the salt dome and the possibility of a breach. When another
company surveyed the dome a few years ago, it found that Texas
Brine's cavern was less than 100 feet from the outer sheath of oil
and gas, far closer than is permitted in other states. While
Louisiana had restrictions on gas storage caverns, it had nothing on
the books for active brine wells—only what regulators called a
"rule of thumb" that wells be set back 200 feet.
When
Texas Brine applied for a permit to expand Oxy3 in 2010, the company
pressure-tested the cavern as mandated by the state, but it was
unable to build up the requisite pressure, let alone sustain it. "At
this time, a breach out of the salt dome appears possible," Mark
Cartwright, a Texas Brine executive, notified the state's Department
of Natural Resources. The DNR asked Texas Brine to "plug and
abandon" the well. The agency did not, as it sometimes does,
request further monitoring. Both parties expected the cavern to hold
its shape, and it did until early June 2012, when Gary Metrejean felt
the ground shake.
"I
didn't want to say anything because I didn't want everyone to think I
was crazy," he says. But his neighbors noticed it, too. And they
also saw something else unusual—bubbles of gas ("like boiling
pasta," one resident recalls) appearing around the bayou.
Oxy3
was starting to cave in, but at the time the community was at a loss.
The state's experts first suspected a leak from a natural gas
pipeline, but that turned up nothing, so they investigated and ruled
out the possibility that the bubbling might be "swamp
gas"—naturally occurring emissions from decaying plant life.
The US Geological Survey confirmed an increase in seismic activity
but couldn't determine its exact source—there are no fault lines in
the area. At the end of July 2012, with tremors and bubbling
increasing and no clear signs of subsidence, Texas Brine, which had
emerged as a possible culprit, told state officials that a sinkhole
was highly unlikely.
On
August 3, Bayou Corne residents awoke to the smell of sweet crude
emanating from a gaping pit on the other side of the highway. Gov.
Bobby Jindal issued
an evacuation order that afternoon. Texas Brine got a permit to
drill a relief well. When the company finally accessed the plugged
chamber, they found the outer wall of the salt dome had collapsed.
The breach allowed sediment to pour into the cavern, creating a seam
through which oil and explosive gases were forced up to the surface.
It
has been well established that structurally challenged caverns, owing
to a lack of maintenance or poor planning, can cause sinkholes. In
1954, the collapse of a brining cavern at Bayou Choctaw, north of
Baton Rouge—located in the same dome that today houses part of the
US Strategic Petroleum Reserve—created an 820-foot-wide lake. In
2008, a 150-foot-deep crater known as "Sinkhole
de Mayo" opened up over a cavern 50 miles northeast of
Houston that had been used for storing oil drilling waste. But those
disasters were all due to top-down pressure. Oxy3 collapsed from the
side, something regulators and briners had previously considered
impossible—highlighting, once again, how poorly understood the
geology of salt caverns truly is.
Texas
Brine's official line is that it has no idea why its cavern suddenly
gave way; a mess appeared on its property without warning, and it is
doing the responsible thing by cleaning it up. Yet it didn't begin
paying buyouts to evacuees until nine months after the collapse, when
Jindal threatened to shut down its Louisiana operations if it didn't.
The settlements come with no admission of wrongdoing—to the
contrary, the company insists the town is perfectly safe, and that
residents (some of whom have defied the evacuation order) are taking
advantage of Texas Brine's generosity by accepting weekly $875
stipends for living expenses while never leaving their homes. Only 59
homeowners have taken deals so far; others have signed onto a class
action lawsuit against the company that's set to go to trial next
year. Celebrity activist Erin Brockovich has been shuttling back and
forth to Bayou Corne enlisting plaintiffs. "I just don't think
anyone's gonna live there again," she says. "And if no one
lives there, what desire is there for Texas Brine to clean it up?
It's a tragedy really all the way around."
I
MEET MILLARD FILLMORE "Sonny" Cranch, a crisis PR
specialist retained by Texas Brine, in a trailer a hundred yards from
the edge of the sinkhole. Nearby are two storage silos emblazoned
with the company's slogan, "Texas Brine. Responsible Care."
Cranch is a self-described "old fart" with Harry Potter
glasses that wrap around his curly white hair and a habit of pounding
the steering wheel when he wants to make a point.
The
company's cleanup crew is rounding the "clubhouse turn," he
explains, and they believe the sediment level in the cavern is
stabilizing; the sinkhole may still expand slightly, and the burps
might continue, but the worst is in the past. Truth be told, he's not
even sure why the evacuation order is still active, but
hey, if there's a "perceived risk," then safety first,
right? According to Cranch, most of the gas that has been detected in
explosive levels under the community is "naturally occurring
swamp gas." (State officials aren't so sure.) Besides, Cranch
tells me, it's not as if there's anything particularly menacing about
hydrogen sulfide. "Flatulence is H2S," he says,
sensing a chance to lighten the mood. "You're producing H2S
as we speak right now."
In
the car, Cranch says this morning's burp hadn't released much oil,
but once we get to the site and inhale the fumes, he quickly revises
his estimate upward: "I lied—that's more than five gallons."
While the DNR warns that accurate measurements are difficult, John
Boudreaux, the Assumption Parish director of emergency preparedness,
told me more than 300 gallons had surfaced. (In July, Boudreaux
double-checked the company's estimate of the sinkhole's depth—140
feet, Texas Brine claimed—and found that it had understated the
figure by a factor of five.)
Given
the class action, Texas Brine has a financial interest in deflecting
the blame. During our outing, Cranch floats two possible culprits for
the sinkhole: an oil well that another company drilled just outside
the edge of the dome in the 1950s, or perhaps an earthquake. This
isn't the official Texas Brine position, he's careful to add—"that's
just Millard Cranch, theorizing."
The
locals find such theories particularly irksome. "They think
we're just a bunch of ignorant coonasses," says Mike Schaff, who
like a few dozen Bayou Corne residents has ignored the evacuation
order and stayed in his home. "We may be coonasses—but we're
not ignorant."
Ignorance,
willful or otherwise, is inextricable from what happened in Bayou
Corne. Not only do Louisiana regulators have a poor grasp on how
miners may be disturbing subsurface geology, they also have a pretty
vague sense of how many caverns are located close to the outer ring
of salt domes. In January, the Department of Natural Resources
ordered companies with salt caverns to provide their most recently
updated maps, and the agency is working on rules that would require
additional modeling of the 29 caverns that are within 300 feet of an
edge.
And the agency is proposing regulations mandating that caverns
be shut down and monitored for five years, rather than simply plugged
and abandoned, if they fail a mechanical integrity test.
That's
a start. But Wilma Subra, a MacArthur "Genius Grant"-winning
chemist who advises the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, a
group that's been monitoring the Bayou Corne sinkhole, is dubious
that any meaningful action will be taken. "The regulatory
climate is such that agencies are only allowed to put forth
regulations that the industry supports," Subra says. Meanwhile,
she adds, "What occurred in Bayou Corne shows what could
potentially occur in any number of the other salt domes that have
storage caverns."
JUST
DOWN THE ROAD FROM what's
left of Bayou Corne, the slabs and dead grass of Grand Bayou stand as
a warning, albeit one nobody paid much attention to. There's a road
sign on the water's edge bearing an Oliver Wendell Holmes quote:
"Where we love is home—home that our feet may leave but not
our hearts." The sign includes a date to mark the beginning of
the settlement. There's no year of death, but it reads like the
town's tombstone.
Back
at the Assumption Parish library, Candy Blanchard has the floor and
she's rolling. The exodus is on everyone's mind. She and her husband
were planning out their retirement in a community their families had
called home for generations.
"Anybody who stays here and camps
here, you gotta wanna be here," she says. "I mean, it's not
a booming place." They hunt, they fish, they frog—or they did,
anyway. But for the last 10 months, they've been crashing with
friends in Paincourtville, and her husband has fallen into
depression. Every morning, Blanchard, an elementary school teacher,
breaks down on her drive to work and collects herself in the parking
lot. But there's something about her odyssey her students seem to
grasp immediately. "I taught migration this year," she
tells the sniffling room. "It was the easiest lesson I've taught
in my entire life."
Posts
