The Lake That Flushed Itself

On November 20, 1980, a lake in Louisiana drained like a bathtub. Because somebody pulled the plug.

This is Lake Peigneur. Ten feet deep, eleven hundred acres, a quiet fishing lake. A quarter of a mile beneath it, men were mining salt. They had been since 1919.

That morning, a crew drilling for oil miscalculated their position. A fourteen inch drill bit punched through the roof of the mine.

The lake poured in. A whirlpool swallowed the drilling platform, eleven barges, a tugboat, and sixty five acres of land.

Then the canal that drained the lake reversed. The Gulf of Mexico began flowing inland, backwards. Where the canal met the empty lakebed, it built a one hundred fifty foot waterfall. The tallest Louisiana has ever had. All fifty five miners escaped. The rig crew ran in time. Not one person died. Days later, nine of the eleven barges popped back up like corks.

The lake came back within days, salt water instead of fresh. Ten feet deep before. Two hundred feet deep now. It is still there, an hour south of Lafayette.

And there is a postscript, written in government records. Eight days after the lake drained, a new well went in, less than a mile from shore. Sixteen more followed. The wells around Lake Peigneur have been listening to the water underground ever since.