“They goin’ down,” John Boudreaux recalls telling a colleague as he recorded the watery cataclysm unfolding before him with an iPhone camera. “They” were a grove of cypress trees; “down” was into a sinkhole in rural Louisiana that had steadily grown to a depth of several hundred feet of fetid water – and was in the throes of a violent growth spurt. Boudreaux’s video, posted on YouTube in late August, went viral in the way that recordings of disaster tend to, leading to alarmist headlines: e.g., “Mining Madness: 750-Foot-Deep Sinkhole Swallows Louisiana Town.”

That sinkhole was then a year old, and Boudreaux, an emergency response official, had filmed it several times by then, though never before had he captured it burping with such violence, sending combustible methane up through fractures in the earth while sucking down trees and soil. Boudreaux is not surprised that his video has spurred widespread fascination. Speaking to Newsweek from the town of Bayou Corne, which has been largely emptied as the sinkhole gnaws away at its borders, he says, “How often do you see a tree go straight down?”

So far, there hasn’t been a fiery explosion. But, in addition to consuming all those trees, the sinkhole has caused small earthquakes and spewed gas and oil. And it’s still growing. State officials estimate it will expand from its current size of about 26 acres to at least 40 acres over the next several years. If, while doing so, it breaks through a modest earthen barrier, it will poison the waters of Bayou Corne, forever spoiling these verdant banks.

Once a rural paradise, Bayou Corne could become a ghost town as a result of a man-made ulcer whose depths defy understanding.

Cancer Alley, a stretch of about 100 miles between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is home to some 150 petrochemical plants, making these swamplands perhaps the most industrialized (and polluted) region in the United States.

The latest plague ravaging Cancer Alley is that enormous sinkhole in Assumption Parish, a burgeoning cavity that is a pestilence both real and symbolic, relentlessly swallowing land while reminding residents of the despoliation the past 60 years have inflicted on their sinuous bayous and abundant cypress groves. As Bayou Corne’s citizens abandon their homes, fleeing the specters of methane and vandals and depressed home values, they stand to become yet another Louisiana community sacrificed to the twin gods of oil and gas.

"It’s like a science-fiction movie,” says Marylee Orr, who heads the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, which she runs out of a ranch-style home in Baton Rouge decorated with Kennedy brothers memorabilia (as well as a 1990 cover of Newsweek bemoaning the plight of “Huck’s River” – i.e., the Mississippi). She and other activists are doggedly following the efforts of Texas Brine – the mining company responsible for the sinkhole – to contain the damage and compensate the working-class residents of Bayou Corne, many of whom own little beyond what is now irredeemably ravaged land. At the same time, she and the so-called Green Army of retired Army Lieutenant General Russel Honoré are desperate to end a long-standing laxity toward energy companies, one that gave rise to the quip that the flag of Texaco flies above the state capitol building in Baton Rouge.

"We have the best government in Louisiana that the oil and gas business can buy,” says Honoré, a native of Louisiana who grew up in rural poverty, rising through the military ranks and heading, in his most prominent role, Joint Task Force Katrina after the 2005 hurricane hit New Orleans. Of the seemingly endless favors Louisiana has offered energy companies through either taxation or legislation (or the lack thereof), the man known as the Ragin’ Cajun says, “We the dumbest asses of all.”

Texas Brine, a Houston company, arrived in Bayou Corne in 1976. It drilled a cavern now known as Oxy Geismar #1, so called because the land was owned by the Occidental Chemical Company, which cutely calls itself Oxy, and because the product of that mine travels via pipeline to an Oxy plant in Geismar, in nearby Ascension Parish. Texas Brine drilled Oxy Geismar #2 that same year, then, in 1982, drilled Oxy Geismar #3.

Salt is abundant in Louisiana’s marshy soil, with 127 saline domes distributed throughout the state. The salt dome at Assumption Parish, three miles in length and one in width, is called Napoleonville, an allusion to the French settlers who arrived here more than three centuries ago. It shares that imperial name with a nearby village of 660 residents, whose most famous product is probably New York Giants running back Brandon Jacobs. Overall, the state has 254 solution-mined caverns bored into its salt domes, says Patrick Courreges, communications director for the state’s Department of Natural Resources.

Texas Brine, which proudly brands itself “the largest independent brine producer in the United States,” came to harvest the contents of the dome. By injecting water to about 5,600 feet below the ground, it created an ever-expanding cavern that filled with highly salty water known as brine. As Texas Brine continued to inject water into the cavern, the cavity grew, filling with brine that was continually being pumped out.

After it is shipped to Geismar, the brine is subjected to the chlor-alkali process, which turns the salt (sodium chloride) into chlorine and caustic soda (sodium hydroxide). Both of these are vital to the petrochemical industry. Chlorine is fundamental in the composition of plastics like polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a material that goes into everything from pipes to clothing. A website for the Chlorine Institute, a lobbying group, notes the element’s presence in so many items (bullet-proof vests, antihistamines, surfboards) that nobody could possibly miss the point. As for the sodium hydroxide, it is crucial to a process called caustic washing, which helps purify the oil housed in vast refineries that stand like battlements along what was once Huck and Tom’s riparian paradise. Also known as lye, sodium hydroxide goes into soap and can be used to cure foods like olives. We are dependent on oil, but we are just as dependent on brine. Or, as a company representative put it to me, “This country has an enormous appetite for smartphone cases.”

Those cheap goods come at a cost. On November 20, 1980, a mine on the Jefferson Island salt dome – which sat in the middle of Lake Peigneur, in Iberia Parish – collapsed after the 14-inch-wide drill bit of a Texaco oil rig poked through its ceiling. That amounted to pulling the plug out of a full bathtub, water rushing into the hollows below in what the obscure-history site Damn Interesting artfully calls a “swirling vortex of doom.” Eleven barges and a tugboat were sucked into the whirlpool, whose force started to pull water from the Delcambre Canal, reversing the direction of that waterway and creating Louisiana’s tallest waterfall. More than 65 acres of land were lost. Somehow, nobody died.

Disaster edged closer to Bayou Corne in 2003, when Grand Bayou – a tiny town about a mile east – had to be evacuated after methane started leaking from a salt cavern there. Grand Bayou is flat nothingness today, a concrete foundation suggesting a house of which no other traces remain. A portico sits on the bayou’s overgrown edge; next to it is a marker that names the town and quotes the eminent 19th century Bostonian Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Where we love is home – home that our feet may leave but not our hearts.”

Despite these twin disasters, most people who built or bought houses in Bayou Corne (corne means antler in French, an allusion to the branches of the bayou) say they had little conception of the malevolence lurking in the cypress thickets beyond the edge of town. “We were living in what truly is a bayou paradise,” says Dennis Landry, a retired teacher, oil industry worker and real estate developer of Cajun descent who can trace his family’s arrival in Louisiana back to the 1780s. In 1994, he founded a subdivision of neat brick manses on the south side of Route 70, along the lush banks of Bayou Corne. He called the subdivision Sportsman’s Paradise, a nickname for Louisiana emblazoned on the state’s license plates.

Piloting in his boat down the bayou, he rhapsodizes on the pleasures of living here, calling one branch of the lazy stream the “most lonesome bayou in Louisiana.” That’s a paradox, considering that industry hems in this wilderness. But when he’s on his boat, Landry forgets all that. “This is one of the few places in the world where a fella can live and, when those cool breezes in the fall start blowing, he can make an early morning hunt, catch a mess of fish, and still make it to [Louisiana State University’s] Tiger Stadium on time for kickoff in Baton Rouge.”

But a mandatory evacuation order has been in place for more than a year, and though many of his neighbors remain (it is not yet a forced evacuation), the subdivision has the uneasy feel of emptiness, as does the poorer section of town on the other side of Route 70. Landry laments that “now, paradise is threatened.”

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http://www.newsweek.com/sinkhole-eating-louisiana-224737