A New Orleans news station broadcast that the residents around Bayou Corne are under a mandatory evacuation of the area. They mention the bubbling in the Bayou and say it is "Natural Gas", they mention the Butane cavern and of course the sinkhole. Here is the latest Flyover video. Here they show the rig that will be drilling the "pressure relief hole"
Update - 8/20/12
My local NBC news just had information about the sinkhole
Two things I noticed. First they are using the flyover video from the 1st day. They showed a small sinkhole. They did not show it as it is today. They also lied and said that it is 300 feet wide. We know it is double that size. On the 16th, before it grew another 50 feet it was at 640 feet across.
So the news is now broadcasting the information but they are lying and they are not saying how big it really is.
As I understand it, the cavern near the sinkhole, and thus the salt dome, was damaged well over a year ago and the well plugged. A couple of months ago the bubbles began, accompanied by ground shaking. We can attribute the shaking to crumbling earth beneath the sinkhole shaking bit by bit as the cave-in worked its way to the surface. Meanwhile, the bubbles continue. Has anyone stuck a funnel over them and measured how much is actually bubbling out? Shouldn't we be able to calculate a volume per time estimate? Yes, it would depend on how deep they originate due to pressure, but still, we should be able to determine what size cave-in to expect based on the total gas volume that's bubbled out over the past 80+ days. Do we know if there are other sites venting that are not as easy to spot as bayou bubbles? Would we notice them deep in the trees, or on dry ground? Why do we think these are the only bubbling areas? The bubbles are coming up - isn't water going down where they were? Isn't that fresh water? Is it dissolving salt as it seeps back down the bubbling pathways? If the bubbling didn't change when the sinkhole caved in, is another cavern being undermined by the bubbling? This is different from Lake Peigneur because the caverns are filled, but I keep thinking about that fresh water seeping in under the bubbling areas and really want to know where it's going in relation to the remaining caverns. Do we have the expected pressure in all of the other caverns so we know they are not compromised?
ReplyDeleteGREAT Questions!!!!!
Delete"pressure relief hole"?
ReplyDeleteThank God these guys aren't Doctors!
But seriously, this kind of ties in with a story I read, be it true or false, about frozen methane under the Gulf of Mexico that is thawing and is coming out of the gulf as methane gas bubbles. It sounds far out, but I thought you might want to know about it.