Friday - April 6 - Happy Good Friday and I hope all our family enjoyed their dinner at Pat’s, we’re sorry we weren’t there. I had an e-mail from Barb and she says there is snow there so we hope the driving was okay for everyone. The weather here sure beats snow, it got up to about 70 today and was sunny so we aren’t complaining. Tomorrow and Sunday are supposed to be cold - low 50’s, and wet so I guess we will also be having some rotten weather.

Today we went to Rip Van Winkle Gardens and toured the gardens and Joseph Jefferson house which was built about 1870. There weren’t a lot of flowers out yet but the gardens were still nice and there were a lot of beautiful old live oak trees. The house was very interesting and it is the first home we have toured where you could actually walk through the rooms and touch things if you wanted to. It was a beautiful home so we enjoyed the tour. We went to the café there for lunch and had a bowl of Crawfish Cardinale which was a cream soup with mushrooms, cognac and lots of crawfish - it was wonderful and quite spicy. We then split a Po Boy sandwich so tonight’s dinner will be very light!

In 1980 there was a disaster at Lake Peigneur and I have copied this report about it from the internet as I think it is quite interesting:

Lake Peigneur is located between New Iberia, and Delcambre, Louisiana, near the northernmost tip of Vermilion Bay.

The name Peigneur is Cajun French for "comber", relating to someone who works with wool in the process of weaving fabric, a highly regarded skill among early Cajuns. It was an eleven foot deep freshwater lake popular with sportsmen until an unusual man-made disaster on November 21, 1980, changed the structure of the lake and surrounding land.

At that time, Diamond Crystal Salt Company operated the Jefferson Island salt mine under the lake, while a Texaco oil rig was drilling down from the surface of the lake searching for petroleum. Somehow, the drilling bit entered the mine, starting a remarkable chain of events, turning an eleven foot deep lake into the deepest lake in Louisiana, and changing it from fresh to salt water.

It is difficult to determine exactly what happened that day, as all of the evidence was destroyed or washed away in the ensuing maelstrom. The now generally accepted explanation is that a miscalculation by Texaco regarding their location resulted in the drill puncturing the roof of the third level of the mine. This created an opening in the bottom of the lake, similar to removing the drain plug from a bathtub. The lake then drained into the hole, expanding the size of that hole as the soil and salt were washed into the mine by the rushing water, filling the enormous caverns left by the removal of salt over the years. The whirlpool easily sucked up the $5 million Texaco drilling platform, a second drilling rig that was nearby, a tugboat, eleven barges from the canal, a barge loading dock, seventy acres of Jefferson Island and its botanical gardens, parts of greenhouses, a house trailer, trucks, tractors, a parking lot, tons of mud, trees, and who knows what else. A natural gas fire broke out where the Texaco well was being drilled.

Local media reports at the time stated that at least one fisherman had to abandon his small boat in the mud and walk back to shore, as his boat was now sitting on the lake bed, with him still sitting in it. So much water drained into those caverns that the flow of the Delcambre canal that usually empties the lake into Vermilion Bay was reversed, making the canal a temporary inlet. This backflow created, for a few days, the tallest waterfall ever in the state of Louisiana, at 150 feet (50 m), as the lake refilled with salt water from the Delcambre Canal and Vermilion Bay.

Remarkably, there were no injuries and no human lives lost in this dramatic event - all 55 employees down in the salt mine at the time of the accident were able to escape, some through heroic efforts by co-workers, and the staff of the drilling rig escaped the platform before it was sucked down into the new depths of the lake - though three dogs were reported killed. Days after the disaster, nine of the eleven sunken barges popped out of the whirlpool and refloated on the lake's surface.

It is important to note that the lake is not salt water as a result of water entering the salt mine. The salt water came in from the Delcambre Canal and Vermilion Bay, which are naturally salt or brackish water. The event permanently affected the ecosystem of the lake by greatly increasing the depth of the lake from eleven feet to 1,300 feet at its greatest depth, and changing the lake from freshwater to saltwater. The biology of the lake was taken into account as salt water plants and wildlife were introduced over time, replacing what was there before.

The drilling company, Texaco and Wilson Brothers paid $32 million (USD) to Diamond Crystal and $12.8 million to nearby Live Oak Gardens in out-of-court settlements to compensate for the damage caused.

Our tour guide said two rooms of the Jefferson mansion were pulled away from the rest of the house during the disaster - can you imagine!

When we got home there was happy hour over at Betty’s so we grabbed a beer and went over and enjoyed meeting some of the people who are here.