BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A Houston-based brine company agreed
Saturday to make a "significant contribution" to a fund for residents
ordered to evacuate their homes after a sinkhole formed in Assumption
Parish that may be connected to one of the company’s salt caverns.
Texas
Brine Co. LLC’s original permit for the cavern requires the operator to
provide assistance to residents in areas deemed to be at immediate
potential risk, in the event of development of a sinkhole and an
evacuation, the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency
Preparedness said Saturday.
Assumption Parish officials ordered an evacuation Aug. 3, the day the sinkhole was
found.
Company officials said Friday it will be at least 40 days before they get definitive
answers about the sinkhole.
Mark
Cartwright, president of United Brine Services, a subsidiary of Texas
Brine Co., said Friday the company spent the last week "intensely
focused" on an emergency response as they try to figure out the cause
behind a sinkhole near Bayou Corne.
Cartwright said they’ll be
drilling a relief well to investigate a brine cavern they own, which is
housed within the Napoleonville salt dome. It will take at least 40 days
to drill the well, and scientists have speculated that the
372-foot-wide and 422-foot-deep sinkhole might be related to structural
problems within the cavern, he said.
"Our efforts are going to be
more focused on diagnostics, and looking into what caused this event,"
Cartwright said at a press conference in Gonzales.
The company
told the state Saturday that it planned Monday to submit its permit
application for the drilling of a new well into the abandoned cavern to
determine the stability of the cavern structure and what pressures,
brine or natural gas, it contains.
Commissioner of Conservation
Jim Welsh had ordered the company to drill a well and investigate the
salt cavern and "further evaluate potential causes of the subsidence
near its well site," as well as obtain samples of cavern content.
Cartwright
said the company was just as shocked as anyone else when the sinkhole
erupted, swallowing up an acre of bald cypress trees and leaving diesel
fumes and slurry water in its wake.
The sinkhole sits on top of an
underground mountain of salt and residents of Bayou Corne have been
reporting tremors and gas bubbles for weeks. Despite a battery of
diagnostic tests from federal, state and local officials, no one has
been able to pinpoint the source of either occurrence.
When the
sinkhole expanded, the owners of three natural gas pipelines at the edge
of the liquefied area were asked to flare off and depressurize their
pipelines as a precaution. Louisiana Highway 70 was temporarily closed
and Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency in Assumption
Parish. At least 150 homes and several businesses were ordered to
evacuate.
Cartwright said they never thought their salt cavern,
which was plugged and abandoned in 2011 and isn’t used to store natural
gas, would be behind the gas bubbles and tremors. But seismic readings
from the U.S. Geological Survey were able to narrow down the
concentration of the earthquakes to the western edge of the dome, which
is where the Texas Brine salt cavern lies.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.