Dennis and Pat Landry had gone out for a relaxing ride in their pontoon boat on Bayou Corne, a stream that travels through Louisiana when they came across some unusual bubbles.  They hadn’t done much about it or told anyone, because everyone living in that area thought it was just a leaky pipeline.

Boy, were they wrong. On August 3, 2012, the stream expanded to 325 feet across and hundreds of feet deep. The once stream, now sinkhole, could swallow 100 foot trees, consuming all the water from the closets, swamps, or rivers. Its biggest flaw was shooting methane up to the surface from hundreds of feet beneath the water. Mr. Landry claims he saw a glimpse of hell when looking into the sinkhole.

The small town of Bayou Corne will be changed by this sinkhole forever. Consisting of a mere 300 people, the town has now split into two groups: the hopeless, who have fled their homes and continuously blame the sinkhole on the government, and the second group, the hopeful, who sincerely believe the sinkhole will go away eventually and everything will go back to normal.

Now the sinkhole is roughly 25 acres across and will continue to grow until further notice. Day in and day out, it will gulp down trees taller than any building, brush as big as a car, and any home that stands in its way. Geologists are still wondering what this sinkhole could mean for the future and where it came from. Meanwhile, the town is evacuating to safer grounds, but some folks are struggling to sell their homes because nobody wants to buy a house that could potentially be swallowed up.

Many of the residents will find their backyards filled with bubbling methane gas due to Louisiana lying above a prehistoric ocean. Some believe the salty remains from the ocean have bubbled upwards underneath the Bayou Corne, thus explaining the bubbling waters.

The Napoleonville salt dome that lies near Bayou Corne is three miles long and a mile wide. It plummets up to 30,000 feet down to the ocean floor. Many locals will store propane, natural gas and butane gas in the dome. After many years they have, been able to hollow out the dome to 53 caverns.

Texas Brine Company sank a well into one of the caverns in 1982 that was 150 to 300 feet wide and four tenths of a mile deep. When the cavern filled up completely in 2011, the Texas Brine Company pumped fresh water into the cavern while sucking out the salt water simultaneously. TBC ended up shipping this out to the owner of that particular cavern, the Occidental Chemical Corporation.

Many lawsuits have surfaced from this happening in 2011 to the present day. Sometime since 2011 the wall had collapsed, the caverns started filling with rock and mud which dropped into the vacant space which let up the natural gas. While the gas was floating up all the surrounding rock was slipping down creating the sinkhole that is tearing this town apart.

Mr. Schaff is planning on moving out because he believes every time “You go in the swamp, and there are places where it’s coming up like boiling crawfish.”

People are hopeful, thanks to some geologists who claim the sinkhole will stop growing. They have hypothesized it will grow to 50 acres but are unsure how long that will take or if it will even stop when it reaches that goal. The state of Louisiana has come up with regulations on salt dome caverns for the future.

The Texas Brine Company has started to pump gas out of the layers in an effort to stop it from spreading. Bayou Core is covered in wells where pipelines will be laid to burn the methane off, thus putting an end to the sinkhole. This process could take years.

One of the largest areas containing methane sits right under Mr. Landry’s neighborhood. Surprisingly enough, only two families have decided to evacuate their home and reside someplace safe.

Due to many families staying in Mr. Landry’s neighborhood the anger has transferred over to Mr. Schaff’s neighborhood right across Route 70. It consists of trailer-style homes lying on a maze of roads. Here it is insanely quiet, there are no children playing in the road, no barking dogs and no cars bumping up and down the dirt roads going to and from work. Everywhere you look, there are “no trespassing” signs hung from front doors. What you won’t see is “for sale” signs. The residents here would be crazy to think they could sell their home in a time like this. Many of the residents in this neighborhood have moved to neighboring towns where they rent homes or apartments but still pay the mortgage on their homes in Bayou Corne.

The sinkhole is not just affecting the land and the surrounding town. It’s affecting everyone in the town and the neighboring towns. As a resident of Bayou Corne, you have two choices: to come together as a community, or flee the town and save yourself and your family.