Bayou front homes on Bayou Corne in Cajun Country, Assumption Parish, Louisiana | Wikimedia Commons
Residents around Bayou Corne in southern Louisiana had been reporting bubbles in the water and tremors that couldn’t be explained for weeks when a wooded section of swamp suddenly collapsed on August 3, 2012. Louisiana’s Department of Energy and Natural Resources records show that state and federal agencies were investigating unexplained bubbling in Bayou Corne and nearby Grand Bayou during June and July 2012. On August 3, an area of wooded swamp began to subside, which prompted the state’s commissioner of conservation to declare an emergency. The mandatory evacuation was eventually lifted in 2016, but the community never returned to its pre-2012 population.
On the morning before the collapse, residents also reported a strong diesel-like smell, and a later aerial survey detected a diesel sheen on the surface of the slurry area, while gas continued bubbling through the water. A slurry-filled depression appeared where trees had stood, and the newly formed sinkhole began pulling water and surrounding ground toward it. Reports from the area described shaking beneath homes and bubbles rising through the bayou, and by late July, the frequency of the tremors had increased sharply. Something that had been a wooded swamp eventually became an expanding body of water surrounded by damaged vegetation and unstable ground. The collapse also altered how residents viewed the area around their homes. Roads, property and evacuation routes became part of a problem that could not be solved simply by filling the original hole. The sinkhole itself remained as a large water-filled depression in the Louisiana landscape.
