When it comes to disturbed geology, nothing is impossible, just
unlikely. When the unlikely intrudes on your back yard, all you can
hope for is a benefactor to come forth and make you whole. That has
been a traditional role of government.
In the meantime we have a sink hole here possibly triggered by an
underlying salt cavern which remains flooded with salt brine anyway.
That the conduit or fracture connecting the sinkhole to the surface
is also cutting other gas and oil producing horizons is no surprise
whatsoever. It makes a small mess and goes nowhere.
Get over it and move on. We cannot prove a damn thing and it could
be a collapsed well even from decades ago that went off. Let someone
else figure it out or let Mother Nature deal with it.
In the meantime, the vent wells are burning of around $100 to $150
worth of gas per day.
Bayou Frack-Out:
The Massive Oil and Gas Disaster You've Never Heard Of
Thursday, 06 December
2012 10:21By Mike Ludwig,
The picturesque bayous
in Assumption Parish are now contaminated with natural gas. (Photo:
Jeff Dubinsky / Louisiana Environmental Action Network)For residents
in Assumption Parish, the boiling, gas-belching bayou, with its
expanding toxic sinkhole and quaking earth is no longer a mystery;
but there is little comfort in knowing the source of the little-known
event that has forced them out of their homes.
Located about 45 miles
south of Baton Rouge, Assumption Parish carries all the charms and
curses of southern Louisiana. Networks of bayous, dotted with trees
heavy with Spanish moss, connect with the Mississippi River as it
slowly ambles toward the Gulf of Mexico. Fishermen and farmers make
their homes there, and so does the oil and gas industry, which has
woven its own network of wells, pipelines and processing facilities
across the lowland landscape.
The first sign of the
oncoming disaster was the mysterious appearance of bubbles in the
bayous in the spring of 2012. For months the residents of a rural
community in Assumption Parish wondered why the waters seemed to
be boiling in certain spots as they navigated the bayous in
their fishing boats.
Then came the
earthquakes. The quakes were relatively small, but some residents
reported that their houses shifted in position, and the tremors shook
a community already desperate for answers. State officials launched
an investigation into the earthquakes and bubbling bayous in response
to public outcry, but the officials figured the bubbles were caused
by a single source of natural gas, such as a pipeline leak. They were
wrong.
On a summer night in
early August, the earth below the Bayou Corne, located near a small
residential community in Assumption, simply opened up and gave way.
Several acres of swamp forest were swallowed up and replaced with a
gaping sinkhole that filled itself with water, underground brines,
oil and natural gas from deep below the surface. Since then, the
massivesinkhole at Bayou Corne has grown to 8 acres in size.
On August 3, Louisiana
Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a statewide emergency, and local officials
in Assumption ordered the mandatory evacuation of about 300 residents
of more than 150 homes located about a half-mile from the sinkhole.
Four months later, officials continue to tell residents that they do
not know when they will be able to return home. A few have chosen to
ignore the order and have stayed in their homes, but the neighborhood
is now quiet and nearly vacant. Across the road from the residential
community, a parking lot near a small boat launch ramp has been
converted to a command post for state police and emergency
responders.
"This place is no
longer fit for human habitation, and will forever be," shouted
one frustrated evacuee at a recent community meeting in Assumption.
The Bayou Corne
sinkhole is an unprecedented environmental disaster. Geologists say
they have never dealt with anything quite like it before, but the
sinkhole has made few headlines beyond the local media. No news may
be good news for Texas Brine, a Houston-based drilling and
storage firm that for years milked an underground salt cavern on the
edge of large salt formation deep below the sinkhole area. From oil
and gas drilling, to making chloride and other chemicals needed for
plastics and chemical processing, the salty brine produced by such
wells is the lifeblood of the petrochemical industry.
Geologists and state
officials now believe that Texas Brine's production cavern below
Bayou Corne collapsed from the side and filled with rock, oil and gas
from deposits around the salt formation. The pressure in the cavern
was too great and caused a "frack out." Like Mother
Nature's own version of the controversial oil and gas drilling
technique known as "fracking," brine and other liquids
were forced vertically out of the salt cavern, fracturing rock toward
the surface and causing the ground to give way.
"In the oil
field, you've heard of hydraulic fracturing; that's what they're
using to develop gas and oil wells around the country ..."What
is a frack-out is, is when you get the pressure too high and instead
fracturing where you want, it fractures all the way to the surface,"
said Gary Hecox, a geologist with the Shaw Environmental Group, at a
recent community meeting in Assumption Parish. Texas Brine brought in
the Shaw group to help mitigate the sinkhole.
As the weeks went by,
officials determined the unstable salt cavern was to blame for the
mysterious tremors and bubbling bayous. Texas Brine publically
claimed the failure of the cavern was caused by seismic activity and
refused to take responsibility for the sinkhole, but the United
States Geological Survey (USGS) has since determined that
the collapsing cavern caused the tremors felt in the neighborhood,
not the other way around.
According to Hecox and
the USGS, the collapsing cavern shifted and weakened underground rock
formations, causing the earthquakes and allowing natural gas and oil
to migrate upward and contaminate the local groundwater aquifer. Gas
continues to force its way up, and now a layer of gas sits on top of
the aquifer and leaches through the ground into the bayous, causing
the water to bubble up in several spots. Gas moves much faster
through water than oil, which explains why the bubbles have not been
accompanied by a familiar sheen.
Documents obtained
by the Baton Rouge newspaper, The Advocate, revealed that
in 2011, Texas Brine sent a letter to the Louisiana Department of
Natural Resources (DNR) to alert its director, Joseph Ball, that the
cavern had failed a "mechanical integrity test" and would
be capped and shut down. The DNR received the letter but did not
require any additional monitoring of the well's integrity.
Despite this letter,
regulators apparently did not suspect the brine cavern to be the
source of the bubbles until a few days before the sinkhole appeared,
The Advocate reported. The letter raised ire among local officials,
who did not hear about the failed integrity test until after Bayou
Corne became a slurry pit.
Texas Brine spokesmen
Sonny Cranch told Truthout the company has not officially taken
responsibility for the sinkhole disaster, but has "acknowledged
that there is a relationship" between the collapsed cavern and
the sinkhole.
A Historic Disaster
"It's a tough
problem. Nobody in the world has ever faced a situation like this
that we're grappling with," Hecox told evacuees at a community
meeting on November 13.
At an earlier public
meeting on October 23, Hecox said there is no "cookbook"
for dealing with the sinkhole and, because the disaster is
unprecedented, there is no clear path for a cleanup. After all, he
said, you can't "fix" a collapsed underground cavern.
At the most recent
meeting, Hecox told residents that installing methane monitors in
houses near the sinkhole was one step that must to be taken if they
ever wish to return home. At one point, an evacuee interrupted Hecox.
"You expect us to
go back to our houses again?" the evacuee shouted from the
audience. "Have y'all lost your damn minds?"
No Place Like Home
Nick Romero is a
former postal worker from Baton Rouge who moved to the Belle Rose
community in Assumption parish to retire next to the bayous.
"Until May 30, or
whenever they reported the bubbles and stuff, everything was great
around here, just great," Romero told Truthout during an
interview at his home near the sinkhole in early November.
Romero has a small
boathouse on the bayou behind his home, where he and his wife have
lived for more than 15 years. Romero can simply push a button to drop
his boat in the water and follow the bayou to his favorite fishing
holes.
"The fishing was
great, ah man," Romero said. "I just go over there, turn a
nob, and if they don't bite, I go back to doing what I'm doing."
But Romero has not
gone fishing anywhere in the neighborhood since the sinkhole opened
up nearby.
"You just don't
know what could happen next," he said.
Every night before
going to sleep, Romero surfs the web for updates on the sinkhole from
various local and state agencies. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle
of the night, worried about the sinkhole, and spends hours thinking
about questions to ask authorities, or looking up information online.
Romero said he
sometimes smells the sinkhole, which sits behind a tree line on the
other side of a nearby state road. The morning before the interview,
he said, was the first time the fumes came into his house. The air
outside was heavy and thick, and soon the smell was inside, hanging
low about the house. Luckily, he said, as the day heated up, the
fumes evaporated.
Romero probably
smelled the stench of the crude oil floating on the top of the
sinkhole. Texas Brine has been skimming it from the surface and
pumping what they can out of the ground.
Romero and his wife
among the last people still living in their homes on their block in
early November.The rest had evacuated. Romero said they had finally
decided to move out just a few days earlier, but they did not know
where to go. Should they sign a lease on a new home? What if
returning home became possible in a few months? Hecox and local
authorities have made it clear that they have no idea when the
evacuation order will be lifted. For the Romeros, there are too many
questions and not enough answers.
Romero's decision to
finally evacuate was partially based on serious health concerns: His
wife is battling breast cancer for the second time in a decade. He
gestured with his hand, naming nearby homes where residents had also
developed breast cancer. From 2005 to 2009, Assumption Parish had the
seventh highest breast cancer rate among Louisiana's 64 counties,
according to the National Cancer Institute. Romero is
concerned about radioactive material that was produced by Texas
Brine's mining operation more than a decade ago.
In 1995, Texas Brine
asked state authorities for permission to dump "low amounts"
of soils containing underground radioactive material into the cavern
that is now collapsed. The "naturally occurring radioactive
material," also known as NORM, had accumulated in soils near the
well pad as part of the brine production process.
Texas Brine's Cranch
said there was a "serious discussion" about storing the
NORM in the cavern, but that never happened. Instead, he said, the
company left the material near the wellhead and above ground, as
allowed by state law. Cranch said NORM has a "low level" of
radiation and a "low half-life."
"This stuff is
everyday stuff," Cranch said.
State officials found
NORM in the sinkhole in August, but only at concentrations well below
even acceptable levels. They determined it did not pose a risk to
human health, and there's no hard evidence linking the radioactive
material to the cases of breast cancer noted by Romero. The NORM is
simply another unknown on Romero's list of worries.
"It was a nice,
laidback, easygoing place," Romero said of his community. "You
feel safe. But you just don't have that anymore."
No End in Sight
On November 27, the
sinkhole had a "burp," according to observers. Crude oil
and woody debris rose to the surface, as water from a nearby swamp
was seen flowing into the sinkhole. The "burp" roughly
coincided with seismic activity recorded by the US Geological Survey.
The sinkhole continues
to shift and settle, as do the fractured rocks below it, regularly
causing tremors and micro-earthquakes observed by seismic monitors.
Shaw Geologist Gary Hecox believes the sinkhole may increase in
diameter, and observers have found that the depth of the sinkhole has
decreased from 490 feet to 140 feet.
At a public meeting in
mid-October, Hecox told evacuees that there is a considerable amount
of subterranean material that has yet to be accounted for and may
continue the frack out. At the time, the sinkhole measured 550 feet
across, but Hecox calculated that it could grow to 1,500 feet across.
When asked how many trees and living things could be killed by brine
and oil leaking from the sinkhole, Hecox said he did not know.
The hole won't grow
big enough to swallow the nearby neighborhood or state highway, Hecox
said, but he continued to insist that the mandatory evacuation order
is appropriate. When asked about the risks faced by those who ignored
the order, which is "mandatory" but not enforced, Hecox
repeatedly said that he would "not let his grandkids" live
near the sinkhole.
Cleanup work continues
while residents wait for the undetermined end of the evacuation
order. Some evacuees are staying with friends and family; others are
renting places to stay while they wait.
Texas Brine has
recovered a considerable amount of oil from the sinkhole and
formations below, but the company has failed to keep oil and other
pollutants from contaminating nearby waterways, according to state
officials. On December 1, Louisiana Commissioner of Conservation
James Welsh fined Texas Brine $100,000 for failing to meet several
deadlines for the cleanup effort. The company failed to install a
containment system at the sinkhole to prevent contamination of nearby
waterways by a November 16 deadline, Welsh said. Texas Brine also
failed to meet deadlines for installing methane monitors in nearby
homes and establishing a number of vent wells to burn off natural gas
in the aquifer and other underground formations.
"We cannot, and
will not, tolerate delays or excuses in the effort to protect public
safety and the environment, especially when the people of Bayou Corne
still cannot feel comfortable returning to their own homes,"
Welsh said.
The company is also
under state to orders to pay a weekly $875 stipend to each evacuated
household.
Vent wells set up by
Texas Brine are now burning off the natural gas that contaminated
local aquifer. Like flaming torches, pipes connected to the
aquifer let flames fly into the open air as the gas makes its way out
of the groundwater. One vent well removing gas from the aquifer can
burn about 46,900 cubic feet of gas per day.
Wilma Subra, a chemist
and technical advisor for the Louisiana Environmental Action Network,
has been monitoring the sinkhole and evacuated neighborhood. Subra,
who has documented environmental justice issues across the country,
told Truthout that the evacuees and others living nearby are "a
very well-informed and engaged community."
Public meetings and
web postings provided by local officials, Texas Brine and state
regulators provide the community with updated information on a
near-daily basis. A spokesperson for Texas Brine told Truthout the
company is trying to make its operations as transparent as possible.
Transparency alone,
however, will not bring the evacuees back to their homes.
"We are doing all
we can do.... Mother Nature has to take its course," said
spokesperson Cranch, who added that Texas Brine did not issue the
evacuation order and some people have ignored it and returned home.
Romero and other
residents remain frustrated with Texas Brine. They say that simply
complying with state orders to clean up the sinkhole is not enough,
and the company should go above and beyond the call of duty to return
them to their homes.
"They are
frustrated and they are scared, and the level of frustration and the
level of depression are building," Subra said. "They have
been out of their homes since the beginning of August, and there is
basically no end in sight."
The Bayou Corne
sinkhole is not going away anytime soon. Texas Brine, state
authorities and experts like Hecox have made it clear there is no
magic fix for a massive slurry pit, a collapsed underground cavern
and untold amounts of oil and gas escaping through the disturbed
earth.
These are difficult
facts to face for residents like Romero. Even if they can return to
their homes one day, he said, the neighborhood will never be the
same.
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