A Bayou Corne community activist is hopeful that representatives from several state and parish agencies will attend a community meeting on Thursday and provide him and others the answers about northern Assumption Parish’s giant sinkhole they so desperately seek.
John Achee Jr., who has served as a spokesman for a group of concerned Bayou Corne residents, said people in the area are eager for an update on the status of the sinkhole, which was discovered on Aug. 3 on property owned by Texas Brine Co. of Houston.
Residents invited officials from Texas Brine and several public officials as well as representatives of various governmental agencies. Achee said he was hopeful that many of those invited will show up at a meeting scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Thursday at St. Joseph the Worker Church in Pierre Part and will be able to provide an update.
“It’s been almost six weeks since the last town hall meetings, which is ridiculous,” Achee said.
Residents have been told that no new information is available and won’t be available until Texas Brine finishes drilling its observation well later this week. The well is being drilled to see if an abandoned Texas Brine cavern could be the cause of the sinkhole.
Assumption Parish Sheriff Mike Waguespack said Tuesday he hadn’t confirmed yet if he would attend Thursday’s meeting, but he said he believes parish officials have done a good job of providing to residents the information they have available.
“I think the parish has been doing a good job disseminating the information they have,” Waguespack said. “The problem is there’s no new significant information until they actually get into the cavern.”
Waguespack said parish officials have maintained a blog online at http://assumptionla.wordpress.com/ and posted two updates Tuesday morning. In addition, he said, residents have been given “unlimited access” to come to the parish’s command center near the sinkhole and ask whatever questions they need answered.
Sonny Cranch, a Texas Brine spokesman, said the company’s primary drilling rig was dismantled and is being replaced by a snubbing unit, which will drill the remaining 900 feet from the well to the cavern. The snubbing unit components were being assembled Tuesday, he said, and drilling is expected to resume Wednesday evening.
The snubbing unit is a “precautionary measure” that allows workers to insert a pipe under the pressure coming up from the well and use the pipe to pump in heavy drilling muds to kill the well, Cranch said.
It may take up to 48 hours to finish drilling the remaining 900 feet, said Cranch, who added that he plans to attend Thursday’s meeting.
The sinkhole, meanwhile, continued to grow slightly on Tuesday. Cranch said a portion of soil “on the western edge of the sinkhole that was a couple of feet wide and roughly 200 feet long” sloughed into the sinkhole along with a tree either late Monday or early Tuesday.
It was the second time in three days that land disappeared into the sinkhole after a section of land 20 feet long by 20 feet wide, along with a tree, fell in on Sunday, Cranch said.
While Cranch said he would attend Thursday’s meeting, it’s not known who else will join him. Achee said his top goal was to get the officials in a room and have them available to take questions.
Among governmental agencies and personnel invited to the meeting are the state’s Department of Natural Resources, Department of Environmental Quality, Department of Health and Hospitals, Department of Transportation and Development, Louisiana State Police, the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, and local, state and federal elected officials.
Lauren Lee, a spokesperson for DOTD, said Secretary Sherri LeBas hadn’t received an invitation via fax or email for the meeting, though she was listed on the memo sent out by residents.
Sgt. Len Marie, a public affairs supervisor for Louisiana State Police, said he was “still trying to work out those details” with Col. Mike Edmonson, the State Police superintendent, before committing to attend the meeting.
GOHSEP spokeswoman Christina Stephens said she had been in close contact with parish officials, who, she said, are planning a public meeting most likely for next week. Stephens added that GOHSEP director Kevin Davis would attend that meeting.
DNR and DEQ officials said they were unsure if anyone from those organizations would be available, while attempts to reach DHH officials, U.S. Rep. Jeff Landry, R-New Iberia; state Sen. Rick Ward, D-Port Allen; and state Rep. Karen St. Germain, D-Plaquemine, all of whom were invited, were unsuccessful.
Achee said residents are concerned that some of the signs that existed before the sinkhole formed, such as sharp earth tremors, are back, which he said could mean “the cycle is repeating itself.”
“I’m curious to see who’s going to show up,” Achee said. “I don’t know why they wouldn’t show up. The residents are asking for some answers.”
Work at the site of a giant sink hole in southeast Louisiana has once again come to a halt. This time the stoppage was caused by tremors in the area. This is not good news for residents near the sink hole.
“They got down to 90 feet and experienced gas in the water aquifer and were unable to set water well due to the pressure. We put cement, plug, and got off the site and regrouped to come up with another strategy to set a vent well,” John Boudreaux [director for the Assumption Parish Office of Emergency Preparedness] explained.
[...]
They still do not know where the gas is coming from. Boudreaux said residents will not be allowed to return home until the gas is under control [...] could mean sometime next year.
GONZALES — The sharp earth tremors that rattled the Bayou Corne community during the summer and presaged the emergence last month of a large sinkhole in Assumption Parish have returned, a University of Memphis scientist said.
The tremors appeared to build in July, reached a crescendo of several hundred per day then stopped at 2 p.m. Aug. 2, hours before the sinkhole was found early Aug. 3 on the property of Texas Brine Co. of Houston, officials said.
Later that same evening, the sinkhole prompted parish officials to call for a mandatory evacuation of 150 households in the Bayou Corne and Grand Bayou areas. It remains in effect.
Steve Horton, research scientist with the University of Memphis Center for Earthquake Research and Information, said Friday that about a week ago, one or two sharp tremors began reoccurring every day or so.
Horton sits on a scientific advisory committee that the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources formed to study the sinkhole, the tremors and natural gas releases that are also occurring in area bayous.
Horton, who is working with the U.S. Geological Survey to study the tremors, said the returning tremors are in the same vicinity as the earlier ones — a shallow area underground on the northwestern edge of the Napoleonville Dome.
The sinkhole and the abandoned Texas Brine salt cavern suspected of causing the sinkhole are also in that area.
The 1-by-3-mile dome is a solid salt deposit pushed up from an ancient seabed and used for decades for brine production, oil and gas exploration and hydrocarbon storage. The cavern was hollowed out of the dome throughout nearly three decades of solution mining to make brine for various industries.
Horton said seismic monitoring has narrowed down the source of the tremors to an area larger than — but containing — the sinkhole and the Texas Brine cavern.
While Horton said there is no cause for concern from the tremors, he said one question is whether they might be occurring in some sort of pattern, given how they built up, stopped and have now restarted.
“We were wondering if there might be a cycle to this and so we may or may not be starting a cycle,” Horton sai.d “We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“That is why we’re monitoring it at this point.”
Other developments surrounding the sinkhole have occurred in recent days, officials said.
On Thursday, a contract administrator working for Texas Brine issued 153 checks for the weekly $875 payments to evacuated households and 135 checks for retroactive payments for the two-week period before weekly checks began.
Another Texas Brine contractor continued work Sunday on changing out one drilling rig for another that is better able to handle gas pockets encountered during the drilling of the well, which is aimed at investigating whether the company’s salt cavern is the source of the sinkhole.
John Boudreaux, director of the Assumption Parish Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said some of the returning tremors are being felt.
He said a state trooper was awakened by a tremor about 2:30 a.m. Friday. The trooper was sleeping in cabins near the sinkhole response command post in Bayou Corne along La. 70 South.
Horton said the most recent tremors are probably about a 2 on the Richter scale, which measures the energy of earthquakes.
What might be most vexing about the return of these sharp tremors is that they come in addition to long-period, lower frequency tremors that began Aug. 6. These long-period tremors come from northwest of the sinkhole and not in the salt dome, Horton said.
On a seismometer, the sharp tremors are recorded as having one back-and-forth oscillation in less than a second — multiple oscillations are bunched together like scribble-scratch on a graphical depiction — and the tremors last no more than a minute.
In contrast, on a seismometer, the long-period tremors are recorded as having one back-and-forth oscillation over 20 to 40 seconds — the wave pattern is easily distinguishable on a graph — and the tremors last for three to four minutes.
Horton said he has never seen such a combination of tremors before from the same area at the same time.
“Yes, it does lead to a lot of questions and that’s really where we are,” he said. “We have a lot of questions as to what’s going on and not a lot answers.”
He said the long-period tremors could be related to something connected with natural gas, but he cautioned that was speculation.
“There is something going on with these very long-period signals, and we don’t know what it is … I haven’t figured it out yet,” Horton said.
Recent discoveries of natural gas in a shallow aquifer and in the caprock above the Napoleonville Dome prompted DNR’s Office of Conservation Commissioner James Welsh on Friday to order operators working on the dome to look for gas below their operations. The operators must analyze any gas found and vent or flare it off.
Drilling of the sonic rig that encountered gas at 90’ on Friday was stopped and plugged with cement and grout as they were unable to put in the water well due to the inability to control the gas pushing mud and water to the surface. DNR hired The Shaw Group engineers to redesign a well that can be placed for venting operations. The geo-probe rigs for observation continue to be placed at lower depths to check for the presence of gas. They’re currently working on the Dugas & LeBlanc property, north of LA-70 and two geo-probe wells have been placed on Triche property. DNR is currently looking for locations as well as willing individual property owners to place additional geo-probe observation wells.
The drilling rig is being dismantled and moved out today [...]
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