Published: September 25th, 2012 at 1:26 am ET
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Title: Seismic activity near cavern linked to sinkhole
Source: The Advocate
Author: David J. Mitchell
Date: September 24, 2012
Regional seismic activity damaged an abandoned Texas Brine Co. salt cavern that has been suspected to be the cause of a 4-acre sinkhole in Assumption Parish, company officials said late Monday.
A tool used to measure the depth of the underground cavern found its bottom is 1,300 feet shallower than it should be, indicating “some type of dense material has fallen to the bottom of the cavern,” Texas Brine officials said in a statement.
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Tremors and natural gas bubbles in area waterways preceded the formation of the sinkhole by about two months.
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What’s at the bottom of the cavern? Radioactive material dumped in the cavern during the 1990s was “likely entombed at the bottom”
How much radioactive waste could be inside the cavern? US Gov't: EPA specifically allows radioactive waste to be dumped in salt caverns -- Exempted from hazardous waste requirements
How radioactive is the waste inside the cavern? Louisiana Sinkhole: Radioactive waste in cavern may have exceeded radiation limits -- Up to 20 cubic feet pumped inside
What’s the danger? Chemical Expert: Residents will be exposed to extremely dangerous alpha radiation coming from sinkhole -- Radioactive dust inhaled after carried by wind, surface water
What has testing detected to date? Sinkhole: Radioactivity at 5,900 picocuries per kilogram from uranium and thorium floating on surface, about double background -- "Much higher levels of radiation" down deeper -- Residents' frustration growing (VIDEO)
Published: September 25th, 2012 at 1:26 am ET
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sending...
Salt/sludge slush from the collapsed walls of the cavern is settling on the bottom and is now 1300 feet deep. That is one heck of a lot of slush.
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Or maybe its 1300 feet of illegally dumped toxic crap. Although its hard to know how they got it in there with all that gushing gas pushing it back out the hole.
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vivvi, i'm with you on that one. Now, maybe it's just me, but, it is my understanding that it's not that hard to figure out what kind of rock material your drill core brought back up and you don't call it "some kind of dense material". Within minutes, any geologist should be able to say it is such and such rock. So, i start to think to myself, maybe it isn't rock, which would include salt formation, oil, shale, limestone, etc. And, if it isn't rock, and it is solid, "dense" they call it, and "oily" they call it, and "gasseous" they call it, then it got put there by someone other than the Earth and it either has several different forms or it is several different things mixed together. And, that takes me to the notion that many have reached – fracking sludge. The top of the cavern might have fallen into the mess, as some at the site have suggested the fracking sludge dissolved the salt dome. And, if this is true, then this is occurring in this salt dome and ALL the salt domes that have fracking sludge. But, since the government protects the secret locations of fracking and fracking sludge from public knowledge, and quite possibly, intergovernmental knowledge, it's possible the folks on the ground aren't hiding anything. They may be in the dark just as much as we are.
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They didn't drill that far, Vic. They claimed to run the bit another 80' past the cavern top after breaching it before they pulled it.
They're suppose to be running a wireline-hung sonic caliper now and expected to use it all the way to the bottom. The bottom just showed up a little 'early'.
They'll have to pull the sonic caliper out and run a something like a coring tool on the drill string back to the bottom to get any samples. Wild guess: they'll find salt and mud because the cavern wall closest to the edge of the salt dome has been caving in.
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It wouldn't be 1300 feet of sludge, as there isn't that much sludge around. A typical gas well drilling site will produce a small pond's worth worth of sludge. A single well would have made maybe six inches of pooling in the cavern, probably less. 1300 feet worth of sludge would have taken tens or hundreds of thousands of tank trucks to dump it.
It has to be the sludge dissolving the salt walls of the cavern, which it is certainly capable of doing in large quantities, just from the fumes of the sludge, creating a slush that settles in the bottom.
And federal law protects these idiots from liability, just so these rich, greedy, heartless mongrels can sell LNG to other nations like Japan and make a killing.
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"…1300 feet worth of sludge would have taken tens or hundreds of thousands of tank trucks to dump it…"
*or* one large sinkhole in the swamp above it. I don't think that made it all the way down there, but the cavern is still 2/3 full of something. And its 250' – 300' wide at that part.
Their last sonic log (Oct '07) showed the cavern bottom at 5632'. If something in the cavern is filling it up to the 4300' level, then it would be roughly the full cavern's 19.2M bbl – the area above 4300' of 5.1M bbl or 14 million barrels worth of something.
(104 pages of sonic log fun:)
http://ucmwww.dnr.state.la.us/ucmsearch/UCMRedir.aspx?url=http%3a%2f%2fdnrucm%2fucm%2fgroups%2fconservation%2fdocuments%2fooc%2f4282451.pdf
That's for this well #180708 – the name changed several times over the years: Oxy-Geismar #3, Vulcan #3 and Hooker #8.
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Childish:
"some type of dense material has fallen to the bottom of the cavern"
Some idiots are unable to speak in words.
They are stupid apes, producing noise with no meaning.
We should throw this apes back to their mudhole!
h.
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yep.
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Here is a video launched by successful national video/blogger Dutchsinse with reference to the town meeting attended by hundreds in Bayou Corne…to which no state or local officials and no professionals whatsoever showed up. At that meeting speaker after citizen speaker begged for help and suggested a petition to the Federal government for help…but were not in the know how to make it "fly." Now normally, I'd say especially in these times, federal intervention is a bad thing. But this is different. IF, in fact, the Feds were required to actually remediate… Although I'm not sure, at this point, that there is anything anyone can do except evacuate and reimburse thousands of people…or depending on the explosive potential…millions(?). There are many ramifications, like disarming the people as was done in Katrina. In any case this is the video to circulate, depending on what you think is best. It contains a petition on file with whitehouse.gov. that requires 25,000 signatures to make it across the President's desk. http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=yM5QqgEC7VM&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DyM5QqgEC7VM. I am forwarding it because more than just Assumption Parish, more than Louisianna, more than Mississippi, more than Alabama…more than Georgia, all the way to Florida…the entire South East can now realistically be said to be involved, and this is the right forum for federal intervention in the balance of state's rights.
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Location of petition
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/immediately-appoint-federal-team-assume-control-management-sinkhole-disaster-bayou-corne-la/hjBfgFYR
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Are they not able to determine if the inner dimensions of the cavern have changed as a result of the new 1300 feet of deposits on the cavern floor? Has the cavern widened due to erosion to cause this material to settle? What is the MATERIAL that has settled? Is this the source of the bubbling Methane that is appearing all over the area? Saying the seismic activity caused the damage to the cavern is a vague answer. It seems to me that the seismic activity is the cause of all of these anomaliies and the source of the seismic activity needs to be identified.
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" EPA specifically allows radioactive waste to be dumped in salt caverns — Exempted from hazardous waste requirements"
That oopens up a lot of possibilities to the nuclear industry.
There is no long term stroage for high level nuclear waste that we know of….so maybe the salt domes have been used for just such storage…why else would they be exempt from hazardous waste requirements????
Nuclear waste storage is very high, I can't image the industry not taking advantage of this "opportunity"
Perhaps this was a giant spent fuel storage area for the local reactor…????
If they can't say whats inside the salt dome…it must be something…really bad!
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http://www.masterresource.org/2010/07/spent-nuke-fuel-policy-2/
http://law.justia.com/codes/louisiana/2011/rs/title30/rs30-2117/
Information on reactor waste and salt domes in LA
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Universal Citation: LA Rev Stat § 30:2117
§2117. Radioactive waste disposal; prohibition of disposal of radioactive wastes in salt domes; salt dome usage
A. The secretary shall promulgate and adopt rules and regulations governing the disposal of radioactive wastes and NORM waste in Louisiana except for radioactive waste resulting from military weapons or high-level waste resulting from nuclear-generated electricity. All commercial disposal operations of high-level or low-level radioactive wastes as defined in R.S. 30:2103 on land not owned by the state or the federal government, and all disposals of radioactive waste or NORM waste as defined in R.S. 30:2103 not in compliance with the rules and regulations adopted by the secretary pursuant to the provisions of this Chapter are prohibited.
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On August 31, 1995, Louisiana DNR gave Texas Brine permission to pump about 20 cubic feet of contaminated material back into the cavern.
The Advocate has the approval letter somewhere on its site.
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The link is really long, let's see if it works ok
http://theadvocate.com/csp/mediapool/sites/dt.common.streams.StreamServer.cls?STREAMOID=r1S1uVOg5qIcB8tIAu6ofJM5tm0Zxrvol3sywaAHBAnTo4Mh02qJB27hYWewJpFLE0$uXvBjavsllACLNr6VhLEUIm2tympBeeq1Fwi7sIigrCfKm_F3DhYfWov3omce$8CAqP1xDAFoSAgEcS6kSQ–&CONTENTTYPE=application/pdf&CONTENTDISPOSITION=OnlineSinkhole3Letters080912.pdf
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Transugenic is what they call it.. so we have a harder time finding the details.. "Transuranic waste (TRU) is, as stated by U.S. regulations and independent of state or origin, waste which has been contaminated with alpha emitting transuranic radionuclides possessing half-lives greater than 20 years and in concentrations greater than 100 nCi/g (3.7 MBq/kg).[1]
Elements having atomic numbers greater than that of uranium are called transuranic. Elements within TRU are typically man-made, and are known to contain americium-241 and several isotopes of plutonium.[2] Because of the elements' longer half-lives, TRU is disposed of more cautiously than low level waste and intermediate level waste. In the U.S. it is a byproduct of weapons production, nuclear research and power production, and consists of protective gear, tools, residue, debris and other items contaminated with small amounts of radioactive elements (mainly plutonium).
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The United States currently permanently disposes of TRU generated from defense nuclear activities at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a deep geologic repository."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transuranic_waste
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The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, is the world's third deep geological repository (after closure of Germany's Repository for radioactive waste Morsleben and the Schacht Asse II Salt Mine) licensed to permanently dispose of transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years[1] that is left from the research and production of nuclear weapons. It is located approximately 26 miles (42 km) east of Carlsbad, New Mexico, in eastern Eddy County. It is located in an area known as the southestern New Mexico nuclear corridor which also includes the National Enrichment Facility and Waste Control Specialists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
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From the Texas Brine press release "The retrieved material does not appear to be consistent with material normally found in brine cavern operations."
So has the layer of alluvial sand followed the path of least resistance into the cracked cavern?
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