Peigneur was a very small and shallow saltwater lake of the Vermilion coast of southern Louisiana. One morning in November 1980, it briefly turned into a former lake before becoming the deepest lake in all of Louisiana.
The lake, if you live close to one another, is one of those things – like the Sun of TV or James Cordon – which you accept with acceptance whether you want to see it the next day or not, it doesn’t always happen. In certain situations, they may disappear within a few hours directly in front of your eyes.
On November 20, an oil driller crew contracted by Texaco set out for the lake for a day of exploration, perhaps thinking about how normal their day was going or how accurate they were in choosing locations for drilling for oil. When they started drilling, they soon had a problem: their drill seemed to be stuck. In retreat, it was only a minor problem because they could see that the whole lake, including their bones, several boats, and a small island, had disappeared before their eyes.
Below the lake was a salt mine that had been there for more than 100 years. The drilling crew thought they were too far from the mine, but when they tried to remove their drill the rig began to tilt before it disappeared a bit, which made it quite certain that the OPC might have some time.
The crew was able to escape to shore, where they saw the 46-meter (150-foot) rag disappear into a lake that disapproves meters (10-feet), while Mary’s version of the opposite environmental disaster was like Poppins producing a ladder from her handbag. Several barges near the hole now became a giant whirlpool as the hole continued to grow. Meanwhile, miners at the bottom of the mine began to evacuate as the trench filled with water.
Fortunately, they also got out in time and were able to see part of a nearby island so that the air from the start of the mine would fall 122 meters (400 feet) into the hole with enough force to make it flow. Texaco has paid $32 million in an out-of-court settlement with the Diamond Crystal Salt Company for damages to the mine and $12.8 million to the Live Oak Garden Foundation and Live Oak Gardens Limited.
The project engineer believed that the map he was using used a marketer projection adjustment system, where the map actually used a universal transverse marketer adjustment system. Representing the 3D world on a 2D map is always going to end with some problems and some compromises. No matter how hard you try to get it right, you’ll end up cutting outstretches, squash countries, or other parts of the map altogether.
\The map you are probably familiar with is based on the projection of the marketer, created by cartographer Gerardus Marketer in 1569. It’s a projection of a cylindrical map, in which you place the earth in a cylinder and then project each point on the map to a similar point in the project cylinder.
The meridians (imaginary vertical lines passing through the earth from north to (South Pole) are mapped equally vertically in the map, and the circles of latitude (imaginary horizontal lines from east to west) are mapped in equal spaced horizontal lines.
Both maps have caused errors based on marketer estimates, but in the Universal Transverse Marketer coordinate system, the world is divided into 60 planes and uses more localized local estimates resulting in more accurate mapping at the local level. Use the mistake and you shouldn’t be where it should be and that’s a lake that disappears as a result of an engineer’s mistake.
