Remember the people who brought you the Louisiana sinkhole, the Texas Brine Co? These are the folks whose drilling activities in a salt cavern underneath a small isolated community about 70 miles west of New Orleans caused problems that were overlooked by state regulators in Baton Rouge and ultimately led to a collapse and a massive water hole near the center of the town. That hole grew to the...
If there’s been one common theme in both my life’s work as an environmental lawyer and my writing here on this blog, it is that mankind’s ever-growing thirst for fossil fuels has many unintended consequences — and too often these consequences are not good. Over the years, I’ve seen first-hand how drilling and production of oil and natural gas fields across the Deep...
The saga of the Louisiana sinkhole just keeps getting worse and worse. Officials with the company that mined the brine under the town of Bayou Corne in Assumption Parish — the Texas Brine Co. — and the Louisiana state regulatory agencies said they were simply shocked, shocked in the summer of 2012 when the earth began to rumble under the bayou community and when dozens of residents...
Over the last 12-plus months, I’ve written numerous blog posts about the situation in and around the small Louisiana town of Bayou Corne, where warning signs of earth tremors and methane odors gave way to a sinkhole that eventually grew to the size of the Louisiana Superdome and has kept on growing. One subplot in all my writing about the sinkhole — the result of a salt-dome mining...
They had another community meeting about the sinkhole crisis in Bayou Corne last night, and like the swamp itself, passions are boiling over. Residents are frustrated with the loss of their homes for nearly a year now, with the fairly paltry compensation they’ve been getting and with the pace of negotiations with the company responsible for this environmental disaster, Texas Brine Co. Mike...
Last weekend Bonny Schumaker from On Wings of Care — a tireless advocate who’s been our not-so-secret weapon in the war for salvation of the ecology of the Gulf Coast — went up in the skies over Bayou Corne, the small Louisiana town that’s been ravaged by a sinkhole caused by a collapsing sinkhole, an epic tale of neglect. The latest news from there is not good. The...
It’s hard to believe, but with summer upon us we’re also getting closer to the one-year anniversary of the sinkhole fiasco in Bayou Corne. That means that roughly 350 residents of this bayou community 70 miles west of New Orleans have spent months now out of their homes in a forced evacuation, fleeing the smell of methane, an ever-widening hole in the earth that could now accommodate...
Last week, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal finally answered the question that had lingered in the humid bayou air for months, when he visited the giant sinkhole around Bayou Corne, about 70 miles west of New Orleans. And he came bearing….well, not exactly gifts but promises that the state would apply the necessary pressure to make sure the owner of the collapsing salt cavern under the ground...
How big has the sinkhole in the Louisiana town of Bayou Corne grown? Well, consider this: It’s become so big that even the state’s environment-unfriendly governor, Bobby Jindal, cannot ignore it anymore. Some eight months into the crisis — or maybe two years, if you want to go back to the very first warnings — our GOP governor is going to take the 50-mile short hop to see...
The sinkhole in Bayou Corne — the one that I’ve been writing about here since last summer — is getting simply too big to ignore…or so you would think. At latest report, the gaping hole that has swallowed up trees, vegetation and everything else in its wake is now 8.5 acres in size, and experts expect that even in the best-case scenario it will eventually grow to 12 acres...
