Alexander Nazaryan
A cancerous ulcer larger than the Superdome is eating down a poor, industrial expand of bayou known as Cancer Alley
“They goin’ down,” John Boudreaux remembers informing a co-worker as he documented the watery cataclysm unfolding before him with an iPhone camera. “They” were a grove of cypress trees; “down” was into a sinkhole in rural Louisiana that had continuously expanded to a level of several hundred feet of fetid mineral water – and was in the throes of a aggressive growth spurt. Boudreaux’s foottage, published on YouTube in late August, went popular in the way that recordings of catastrophe usually, resulting in alarmist headlines: e.g., “Mining Madness: 750-Foot-Deep Sinkhole swallows Louisiana Town.”
That sinkhole was then a year old, and Boudreaux, an emergency response official, had filmed it several times by then, though never before had he captured it burping with such violence, sending combustible methane up through fractures in the earth while sucking down trees and soil. Boudreaux is not surprised that his video has spurred widespread fascination. Speaking to Newsweek from the town of Bayou Corne, which has been largely emptied as the sinkhole gnaws away at its borders, he says, “How often do you see a tree go straight down?”