Big engineering Boo Boo!
 

I saw this 1980 disaster a few years ago on the history channel and mentioned it to numerous people who never heard about it so I thought you guys would find it interesting. There have been worse engineering screw-ups involving loss of life whereas this was is notable for the fact that nobody even suffered serious injuries. I'm sure you'll agree that the results from a simple miscalculation had pretty spectacular results.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Of8...eature=related

Rob

Ill never look at a flushing toilet the same way :haha:

Fascinating story.

'It took two days for the water to fill the mine' :o

How many thousands of cubic liters that must have been. The 'gieser' 30'-0" into the air .. holy smokes ! The part about the barges popping back up is freaky too.

No loss of life is really hard to believe.

What is it about Lousiana? :|\\



On a side note there is a lake about a mile from my house that was literally drained by a sinkhole. Of course nothing on the magnitude of your story it took a few weeks to empty but empty it did. There was no loss of life or property (except now its not exactly lake front).

No small lake either it used to be one of the premire bass fishing lakes in north america (Lake Jackson). It was never deep about 10 meters tops but it covered a huge area. Inside of a month it was gone, all of it. People were driving accross the muddy bed in those big ass trucks picking up old outboard motors and crap. I was kinda hoping one would fall in a sinkhole.

Anyhow they used the oppurtunity to clean the muck (which was tainted by decades of 2 cycle outboard oil) and wait for it to fill back up. There was talk about building a dam around the sinkhole but cooler heads prevailed and let nature take its course.

Its starting to fill again after about 5 years.

Oh and Red / Sam's fishing camp, bar, and liquor store is still there :D

The next guy who asks me, what he learned trigonometrics for, I'll show this video.

Can you imagine the awful feeling that some engineer must have experienced when he realized it was his mistake that set the whole thing in motion?

Very interesting video. The salt miners had prepared for something like that to happen and had safety precautions in place and nobody did in the end die. The conditions for something like that to happen existed so it wasn't a big engineering mistake in that sense from the engineer who made it.

I think a bigger engineering mistake would create a deadly situation out of a situation where no immediate threat was supposed to exist. I think the mine operators were at fault as well for having an active mine like that in an oil drilling area. And a salt mine, not like salt is really that valuable either.

That would have been an insurance companies nightmare!!:yep: