Last week, there was a Slashdot thread about Engineering Mistakes [slashdot.org]. And in the thread, there was a comment about Lake Peigneur [slashdot.org].
Having not heard of that incident before, I looked up the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org], which explains that it was a lake that ended up being drained into a salt mine, after a miscalculation by an oil drilling rig. Here's a quote from the article:
The lake then proceeded to drain into the hole, with the packed salt underneath absorbing water nearly as fast as it poured in, resulting in the draining of the lake into the salt mine. A resultant whirlpool sucked in the drilling platform, eleven barges, many trees and some of the surrounding terrain. The salt mine was so large and so able to absorb the water pouring into it that the water level dropped significantly, enough to reverse the flow of the Delcambre canal that leads to the Gulf of Mexico. This backflow created, for a few days, the largest waterfall ever in the state of Louisiana with 50–100 feet (15–30 m), as the lake refilled with salt water to replace the fresh water now in the salt mine.
Holy crap. Can you imagine being one of the people on the drilling rig and having to explain that one?
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