Meet the town that’s being swallowed by a sinkhole

[xchrom]

http://grist.org/business-technology/meet-the-town-thats-being-swallowed-by-a-sinkhole/

About once a month, the residents of Bayou Corne, La., meet at the Assumption Parish library in the early evening to talk about the hole in their lives. “It was just like going through cancer all over again,” says one. “You fight and you fight and you fight and you think, ‘Doggone it, I’ve beaten this thing,’ and then it’s back.” Another spent last Thanksgiving at a 24-hour washateria because she and her disabled husband had nowhere else to go. As the box of tissues circulates, a third woman confesses that after 20 years of sobriety she recently testified at a public meeting under the influence.

“The God of my understanding says, ‘As you sow, so shall you reap,’” says Kenny Simoneaux, a balding man in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt. He has instructed his grandchildren to lock up the ammunition. “I’m so goddamn mad I could kill somebody.”

But the support group isn’t for addiction, PTSD, or cancer, though all of these maladies are present. The hole in their lives is a literal one. One night in August 2012, after months of unexplained seismic activity and mysterious bubbling on the bayou, a sinkhole opened up on a plot of land leased by the petrochemical company Texas Brine, forcing an immediate evacuation of Bayou Corne’s 350 residents — an exodus that still has no end in sight. Last week, Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the company and the principal landowner, Occidental Chemical Corporation, for damages stemming from the cavern collapse.

Texas Brine’s operation sits atop a three-mile-wide, mile-plus-deep salt deposit known as the Napoleonville Dome, which is sheathed by a layer of oil and natural gas, a common feature of the salt domes prevalent in Gulf Coast states. The company specializes in a process known as injection mining, and it had sunk a series of wells deep into the salt dome, flushing them out with high-pressure streams of freshwater and pumping the resulting saltwater to the surface. From there, the brine is piped and trucked to refineries along the Mississippi River and broken down into sodium hydroxide and chlorine for use in manufacturing everything from paper to medical supplies.

[kristopher]

1. Thanks for the update.

[xchrom]

2. ...

[madokie]

3. That is terrible

[gtar100]

4. Their description of fracking sounds like a white wash.

Pumping "freshwater" in... sure they are, sure they are. I'd like for them to prove it rather than demanding we just take it on faith.

[TheMadMonk]

5. Not fracking. Just a really shitty, cheap arse method...

...of salt mining.

[dixiegrrrrl]

6. People in teh South are very strongly tied to the land

My heart goes out to them, losing their homes and land like that.
Esp. considering the ongoing BP oil disaster.
Poor Louisiana can't catch a break.....