Paying Double Rent as Dangerous Methane Bubbles into Homes, Ground Gives Way, and Louisiana Town Struggles to Find Its Footing

Is the Natural Gas Industry to Blame for the Toxic Sinkhole Devouring a Town in Louisiana? by Rod Bastanmehr, September 26, 2013, Alternet
Currently, the sinkhole is roughly the size of 20 football fields, exhausting methane from deep inside its core – and growing daily.

Ground Gives Way, and a Louisiana Town Struggles to Find Its Footing by Michael Wines, September 25, 2013, The New York Times
BAYOU CORNE, La. — It was nearly 16 months ago that Dennis P. Landry and his wife, Pat, on a leisurely cruise in their Starcraft pontoon boat, first noticed a froth of bubbles issuing from the depths of Bayou Corne, an idyllic, cypress-draped stream that meanders through swampy southern Louisiana. They figured it was a leaky gas pipeline. So did everyone else. Just over two months later, in the predawn blackness of Aug. 3, 2012, the earth opened up — a voracious maw 325 feet across and hundreds of feet deep, swallowing 100-foot trees, guzzling water from adjacent swamps and belching methane from a thousand feet or more beneath the surface.

“I think I caught a glimpse of hell in it,”
Mr. Landry said. Since then, almost nothing here has been the same.

More than a year after it appeared, the Bayou Corne sinkhole is about 25 acres and still growing, almost as big as 20 football fields, lazily biting off chunks of forest and creeping hungrily toward an earthen berm built to contain its oily waters. … And it has split this unincorporated hamlet of about 300 people into two camps: the hopeful, like Mr. Landry, who believe that things will eventually settle down, and the despairing, who have mostly fled or plan to, and blame their misery on state and corporate officials. “Everything they’re doing, they were forced to do,” Mike Schaff, one of those who is leaving, said of the officials. “They’ve taken no initiative. I wanted to stay here. But the community is basically destroyed.” … The sinkhole is worrisome enough. But for now, the principal villains are the bubbles: flammable methane gas, surfacing not just in the bayou, but in the swamp and in front and backyards across the area. … Who is to blame for what happened next is at issue in a barrage of lawsuits. … The gas floated up; the rock slipped down. The result was a yawning, bubbling sinkhole. “You go in the swamp, and there are places where it’s coming up like boiling crawfish,” said Mr. Schaff, who is moving out. Mr. Landry, who is staying, agreed — “it looks like boiling water, like a big pot” — but the two men and their camps agree on little else. …

State surveys show that one of the largest concentrations of methane lies directly under Mr. Landry’s neighborhood, a manicured subdivision of brick homes, many with decks overlooking the bayou and its cypresses. Yet only two families have chosen to leave, and while the Landrys are packed just in case, the gas detector in their home offers enough reassurance to remain. … The anger and misfortune are focused on Mr. Schaff’s neighborhood directly across state route 70, a jumble of neat clapboard houses, less tidy shotgun-style homes and trailers on narrow roads with names like Sauce Piquante Lane and Jambalaya Street. There, rows of abandoned homes are plastered with No Trespassing signs, and the streets are deathly quiet.

Candy Blanchard, a teacher, and her husband, Todd, a welder, moved out the day the sinkhole appeared. They now pay the monthly mortgage on their empty and unsellable 7-year-old house as well as the rent on another house.Mr. Blanchard drops by their former home each morning to feed their rabbits and cat, who have lived alone for a year because their landlord would accept only their dog. The couple rejected an offer from Texas Brine to buy their home, and instead have joined a class-action lawsuit against the company. They will never return, she said, because they do not believe the area is safe.

“The point we’re at now is what the scientists said would never happen, that this would be the worst-case scenario,” Mrs. Blanchard said. “How can you find experts on this when it has never happened anywhere else in the world?”

Mr. Schaff’s home also fronts the bayou, and he says he is loath to leave. But investigators found gas in his garage, he said, and he says he is convinced that state officials are playing down the true scope of the disaster. A wry, amiable man with a salt-and-pepper goatee and glasses, Mr. Schaff said he had planned to retire on the bayou. “It’s my home. I want to die there, O.K.?” he said, fighting off tears. “I was going to retire next year, was going to do some fishing, play with my grandchildren, do a little flying. And now, this.” [Emphasis added]

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