For people living in modern society, salt and oil are necessities that are inaccessible to everyone. Salt provides trace elements for the human body, and oil provides necessary fuel for people to travel and drive.
Salt and petroleum are two complementary substances. From the perspective of geology, where there are salt mines, oil generally exists. The same pattern also occurs in Lake Pinel in the United States. The lake was surrounded by salt mines and then oil was discovered. However, a small mistake during oil extraction caused 13 billion liters of lake water to "disappear out of thin air". What exactly happened?
What happened
Lake Pinel is located in New Iberia, a small town in southern Louisiana, the United States. This lake is very unremarkable. It is a freshwater lake with an average water depth of only 5 meters. The lake area is 5,000 square meters. The lake passes through Delcamber. The canal flows to Mexico. At the same time, the lake is rich in catfish. The vegetation on both sides of the lake is lush and lush. It is a good place for local residents to relax and fish after dinner. If I had to point out something unusual about this lake, it would be that there are a large number of salt mines around and below the lake.
Although the amount of salt consumed each time is small, it has a huge effect on the human body. Therefore, salt is a necessity for everyone. Discovering salt mines and mining salt can gain huge economic benefits.
Since the beginning of the last century, this small town has been a famous salt production area in the United States. Most residents of the small town make a living by mining salt. The local Diamond Crystal Salt Company has been responsible for the mining of salt mines, and can obtain a large amount of it every year. economic benefits. With the deepening of geological research, there is more and more evidence proving that salt mines and oil resources are likely to coexist. Salt mining can be carried out near Pinel Lake for nearly a hundred years, which means that there is a considerable amount of minerals beneath the surface of Pinel Lake. of salt.
And a huge amount of salt can effectively block oil. Because oil has a density slightly less than water, it will be slowly displaced to the surface under the action of water, and the salt layer can effectively block the rise of oil and natural gas . This means that there may be a considerable amount of oil beneath the salt layer of Lake Pinel.
After concluding that there may be large amounts of oil beneath Pinel Lake, the oil company Texaco Company contracted the oil exploration project near Pinel Lake. In order to exploit the rich oil under Lake Pinel, Tetugu Company has invested a lot of money. It not only shipped a new drilling platform worth 5 million, but also invited professional surveyors to conduct Gauss-Kluu based on . The lattice projection coordinate system calculated the location of the drilling. It can be said that "everything is ready, all we need is the east wind".
On November 20, 1980, , an ordinary Thursday, 12 exploration and drilling employees of Tetugu Company came to the drilling platform on the surface of Lake Pinel early to start drilling for oil under Lake Pinel. Exploration work. The exploration work went very smoothly at the beginning. Soon the drill bit had reached 180 meters underground. At this time, the drill bit was blocked by a hard object. The workers pulled the drill bit back from the depths of the ground and found that the drill bit had hit the salt mine. According to previous calculations, no salt deposits would be found at this depth. However, these 12 workers did not take this abnormal situation seriously and continued to drill bits for exploration.
When they finally reached 400 meters underground, the drill bit got stuck again, and the workers used various methods to get out of the predicament. However, no matter how they were operated, the drill bit remained motionless. At this time, a loud noise suddenly came from the ground, and the entire drilling platform began to shake. The exploration workers felt the disaster was coming, and immediately pressed the emergency button and jumped to the side of the drilling platform. lifeboat, abandoned the drilling platform worth US$5 million, and immediately fled the drilling site. Just after leaving the drilling platform, the platform began to tilt slowly and was eventually flooded by the lake water.
The consequences
This incident not only caused the collapse of the drilling platform in the lake, but also caused greater harm to the underground space. The drilling platform on the surface of Lake Pinel penetrated the underground salt mine, and the lake water flowed into the salt mine. A worker who was mining salt in a salt mine heard a loud noise suddenly coming from the working tunnel, and then the rushing sound of water flow came from a distance. The worker immediately thought that a water leakage accident had occurred in the salt mine. He immediately followed the previous underground drill procedures and flashed the lights three times to notify the mine workers to evacuate immediately.
Subsequently, the 55 miners in the salt mine took the elevator in an orderly manner and quickly reached the surface from a depth of 4400 meters underground. No one was injured. This was mainly due to the advance measures for underground accidents. out drills.
Just an hour and a half after the accident, a huge vortex with a diameter of 400 meters appeared on the surface of Lake Pinel. . This vortex produced huge suction, directly sucking everything on the lake into the vortex, and then became the lake water. The flow into the current salt mine generates huge pressure. This pressure directly squeezes the salt mine, and the water spurting out from the entrance of the salt mine is more than 120 meters high. In just 43 hours, all 13 billion liters of Lake Pinel's water disappeared, and Lake Pinel went dry.
At the same time, under the action of the huge vortex suction, the flow of water from Lake Pinel to the Gulf of Mexico through the Delcumber Canal also changed. Seawater from the Atlantic began to pour back into Lake Pinel. During the process, a giant waterfall with a height of 450 meters even appeared.
Finally, two days later, the backflow of seawater finally filled Lake Pinel again. This freshwater lake also directly turned into a saltwater lake, and the depth of the lake also changed from 5 meters to 60 meters, becoming Louisiana The deepest lake, and the area of the lake has also increased significantly.
The catastrophic accident that occurred this time fortunately did not cause anyone to die, but it caused huge economic losses and environmental losses. 11 barges and 1 tugboat were sucked into the ground by the whirlpool, .26 million hectares of land was submerged, all underground salt mines were destroyed, precious trees by the lake were submerged, and all the original freshwater fish in the lake disappeared. They were replaced by saltwater fish from the Atlantic Ocean. In the end, Texaco bore all the losses of the accident. They compensated the Diamond Crystal Salt Company in the amount of US$432 million, and the nearby plant nurseries in the amount of US$413 million. All underground salt mines were shut down. So, what exactly caused this huge disaster?
Cause of the accident
The direct cause of this accident was a probe with a diameter of 36 centimeters. Texaco's exploration personnel mistakenly drilled through the direct isolation layer between the lake surface and the salt mine during drilling exploration, resulting in The lake feeds into an underground salt mine. The underground salt mine space is very huge. Some of these salt mines exceed hundreds of thousands of cubic meters in size. Part of the lake water enters the underground space, and the other part contacts the salt and quickly melts the salt, occupying the original space of the salt mine. The event that led to the disappearance of 13 billion liters of water from Lake Pinel.
But the fundamental reason behind it is that there were calculation errors in calculating the exploration position, which directly caused the exploration position to shift significantly. When Texaco was exploring for oil, it directly outsourced the exploration work to Wilson Brothers, a professional exploration company. However, engineers from Wilson Brothers made major mistakes when calculating coordinates.
The original coordinate system that should be used for this calculation process is Cartesian coordinate system . However, the engineers mistakenly used the Gauss-Krüger projection coordinate system, which resulted in completely different reference objects for the two coordinate systems. , inputting the same position will also produce different results.
Therefore, the original exploration site should be far away from the top of the salt mine, but because the wrong coordinate system was used, the survey point was located just above the salt mine, ultimately causing irreparable losses.
Conclusion
Similar incidents in which small mistakes caused great harm include the Soyuz 1 spacecraft crash in the former Soviet Union. This is what people often call "a tragedy of a decimal point", precisely because of the staff An incorrect decimal point in the calculation directly led to the crash of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov and the Soyuz 1 spacecraft.
These major safety accidents that have occurred in the past warn us that we must not be careless in any work, especially when it comes to work related to personal safety, and we must improve our concentration. Once there is an inch of laxity in thinking, it is possible to be even an inch lax in action, leading to serious tragedies. In any work, you must pay attention to details, emphasize the importance of details, and never be careless.
Author: Yaya Preliminary review: Weiyang Proofreading editor: W
