ABOGA, Eddie V October 25, 2020

PetE-3104 Mr. Michael Cervantes

PetE-408 / Drilling Technology
The Lake Peigneur incident occurred in Louisiana, USA. It was said the before the
incident happened, the Lake was only 10-foot deep and has a fresh water in it. A corporation
called Diamond Crystal Salt Company construct and build a mining shaft in there to collect a salt
from salt dome that was parallel to the lake since 1919. It is known to the petroleum industry that
if there is a salt dome, there is a petroleum trapped beside it because salt dome is impermeable. A
drilling company called Texaco which is now part of Chevron Corporation, started to drill in the
lake for petroleum which causes one of the biggest unfortunate incidents that ever happened in
Louisiana. While Texaco was drilling, a miscalculation happened when instead of drilling beside
the salt dome for petroleum, they penetrated the salt dome and hits of the many tunnels of
Diamond Crystal Salt Company. The oil rig workers heard several loud pops and the oil rig tilted
until it collapsed. Luckily, the workers of the said oil rig quickly evacuate and suffer no
casualties other than the $5,000,000 150-ft tall platform sunk into the lake. Fortunately, again,
the workers of the Diamond Crystal Salt Company quickly noticed that something is wrong to
one of their tunnels. A flowing water seen at their 1300 ft below the ground tunnels which isn't a
good indicator because water has the ability to dissolve salt. After noticing this anomaly, the
evacuation alarm was raised and all of the Diamond Crystal Salt Company workers managed to
evacuate safely with no casualties. An engineering error was the cause of the incident, they said
that there was a miscalculation to where they should be drilling. This incident causes a big
whirlpool from an only 10-ft deep lake, it was said to be so big that most of the floating boat,
platform, and ship with trucks just got hopelessly sunk. It took two days for the canal to fill up
the Diamond Crystal Salt Company Mine and is considered to be one of the most dangerous
Petroleum Industry incident.
I believe in the saying that accidents happen far more often to those who don't follow
safety rules. One of the most important things other than the petroleum itself on oil and gas
industry are the workers. This industry is one of those who have high risk but high pay because
of the nature of the work. This means that mistakes aren’t allowed and not tolerated because if
one goes wrong, everything will follow and the only thing that the workers can do is to follow
the planned and rehearsed evacuation drills. One of the things that makes me raise my eyebrow
is that how could miscalculation like this happens? It is called miscalculation for a reason but
this kind of miscalculation is absurd because there must be something wrong with the drilling
plan. Two things that I am keeping an eye on the possible problem is that, either the plan is
miscalculated or the coordinate reference system was misinterpreted. I am sure that the well
planners know the existence of the Diamond Crystal Salt Company mine in there because it was
there since 1919 so they must have a copy of some kind of blueprint, map or layout of the mine
because it was near to where they are going to drill, so, I think the problem here lies to the
misinterpretation of the coordinate reference system because once again, if this was a
miscalculation, it will be absurd if and only if the well planner was new and didn’t have any
experience. One of the best ways to prevent such accidents or lost is complete communication.
Communication is the key to anything that involves a group of people because with this, there
will be no misinterpretation that may result to misunderstanding and accidents like this. If an
incident like this ever occurs again, which I hope should not is that we cannot help it but the
people or the corporation that is responsible for this human error should pay the fine for all the
damages and for the recovery of those who are affected and will be affected by it on the future. I
also include its future effects because the incident were so big it turned the entire lake from
freshwater to salt water lake which will affect its entire ecosystem.