The day a lake fell into a salt mine

There are a lot of things you don't want to happen while drilling for oil. Hitting a salt mine is high on the list. Draining an entire lake into that salt mine is, presumably, even higher.

Which brings us to Lake Peigneur, Louisiana, on November 20, 1980. Peigneur was a perfectly normal lake: freshwater, about ten feet deep, minding its own business. Under it, though, was a salt dome, and inside that salt dome was the Diamond Crystal salt mine, a network of tunnels big enough to drive trucks through. Above all of this, a Texaco rig was drilling for oil, and thanks to a miscalculation about where exactly the mine was, it drilled straight into the roof of one of those tunnels.

Now, here's a fun fact about salt: water dissolves it. So lake water started flowing into the hole, which made the hole bigger, which let more lake water in, which made the hole bigger still. You can see where this is going. So could the lake, which proceeded to drain like someone had pulled the plug on a bathtub.

The resulting whirlpool swallowed the drilling rig, eleven barges, and a good chunk of the surrounding shoreline. It drained so hard that the Delcambre Canal, which normally flows out to the Gulf of Mexico, reversed direction and started pulling seawater in, creating a 164-foot waterfall. That made it the tallest waterfall in Louisiana's history, a record it set entirely by accident.

Incredibly, nobody died. Every miner got out, the rig crew escaped, and the only casualties were three dogs. Days later, nine of the barges popped back up like nothing had happened.

The lake refilled, but it's a different lake now: brackish, and up to 200 feet deep. Texaco and the driller paid Diamond Crystal $32 million, which works out to a pretty reasonable price for an entire lake.