The Sinkhole Thats Eating Louisiana | The Compost Bin | Forums

any of you been following this story, what a ecological disaster, what happens if all that methane in the salt caves gets released?

“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.

http://www.newsweek......ana-224737