We have updated our privacy policy to be more clear and meet the new requirements of the GDPR. By continuing to use our site, you accept our revised Privacy Policy. Article 0 Comments A massive sinkhole that went viral in swallowing trees in Assumption Parish and forcing more than residents from their homes has quieted down as officials slowly allow residents to come home.
Copyright Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Was this article valuable? Yes No. Please tell us what we can do to improve this article. Submit No Thanks. They can swallow parked cars: They can swallow trees with cartoon-like efficiency: White papers from our partners Siemens Smart Infrastructure New criteria for a new, smart building era Siemens Smart Infrastructure Microgrids — the future of energy management Siemens Smart Infrastructure How the smart office acts as a team player in crisis management But for the residents and ex-residents of a tiny town in Louisiana, sinkholes are pretty much the worst things ever.
On 3 August , the residents of Bayou Rouge, Louisiana, noticed a funny, petrol-like smell in the air. Later that day, someone stumbled on a giant hole filled with sludgy water on the western edge of the town, not far from the fork of the Bayou Corne waterway. The hole, it was soon established, was caused by the collapse of an underground salt cavern, mined by a company called Texas Brine. On that first day, the hole covered around an acre of land.
Many left the town; some stayed in defiance of the order. Texas Brine was tasked with investigating the collapse. Yet things kept getting worse.
Texas Brine have burned off millions of cubic feet of escaping gas and oil in an attempt to keep it out of the atmosphere. Sinkhole caused by Texas Brine's failed underground salt dome cavern, with Bayou Corne and surrounding community, background, in aerial photograph taken Sept. But Judge Thomas Kliebert Jr. Texas Brine, Occidental Chemical OxyChem and Vulcan all failed to heed warnings about potential problems with the salt cavern from its conception in the mids to its eventual shutdown about a year before the sinkhole appeared and converted acres of cypress swamp into a lake nearly feet deep, the judge wrote in his page ruling.
In reaching his conclusion of shared fault, Kliebert cited testimony from more than 40 witnesses in a bench trial over liability this fall and decades worth of internal warning emails, reports and memos going back to , six years before the access well for the cavern was even drilled. Kliebert found that Texas Brine had the expertise in the field of solution mining, the day-to-day experience with the cavern and knowledge of long-standing concerns since the cavern was first dug.
But OxyChem and Vulcan exercised ultimate control over mining decisions and also had knowledge of the cavern's increasingly precarious status, he wrote. Texas Brine was salt-mining operator of the failed salt cavern and two others nearby at a site off La.
But salt from the caverns went by pipeline to a chloralkali plant in Geismar owned by Vulcan until a sale to an OxyChem subsidiary. The production site land and underground mineral rights were owned by OxyChem, but the mineral rights were leased to Vulcan Materials until OxyChem took control of the Geismar plant and caverns after the sale. The ruling recently came out of the first trial phase for consolidated lawsuits that Florida Gas and other pipeline companies brought against Texas Brine and other companies over the sinkhole.
As it grew from just a single acre to nearly three dozen, the plaintiffs allege the lake-like hole undermined the earth around their transmission lines, destroying them.
The suits are among a few dozen in state and federal court over the sinkhole. Many remain pending. But, in a legal victory for the Houston-based company, Kliebert found Texas Brine 35 percent at fault. OxyChem was found to have the largest share of liability at 50 percent.
The judge repeatedly cited OxyChem for its "culture of pecuniary interest first" and concluded the chemical giant had a "superior capacity" to prevent the sinkhole. Vulcan was found 15 percent at fault. OxyChem and Vulcan had already settled with the pipeline plaintiffs before trial, but the ruling will have a bearing on what Texas Brine has to pay. Garner welcomed the ruling. He added that though the company immediately "stepped up" in the sinkhole response for the betterment of the community, the company never accepted it was solely at fault for the sinkhole.
OxyChem spokesman Eric Moses said in a statement the company was planning a vigorous appeal. Moses added the judge also failed to account for some of his own conclusions that Texas Brine mismanaged the salt cavern and ignored warning signs.
Spokespersons for Florida Gas and the corporate parents of other pipeline companies in the lawsuits, Enterprise Products and EnLink, declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation. Though Kliebert is expected to take up the damages in a later phase, Florida Gas and OxyChem, which each had argued Texas Brine bore all or the vast majority of the liability, have already filed motions for new trial just weeks since the Dec.
The years of warnings Kliebert referenced ranged from initial concerns about the underlying geology and whether the area would make for a financially viable and geologically stable salt cavern to warnings decades later airing at least some concern that rapid subsidence could occur in connection with the cavern then leaking brine thousands of feet underground.
0コメント