I read this somewhere. It was (supposedly) Lake Peigneur (sp?) in Louisiana. Early '80’s or late '70’s.
Anyone heard of this–true or false?
Yes. It was about 1981 at Lake Peigneur near Abbeville, Louisiana. Texaco drilled into a salt mine and the lake drained in minutes, quickly enough that a whirlpool effect similar to what you see when draining a bathtub was observed.
The foregoing was from memory. If you had anything to do with oil and gas exploration at the time, you’d remember it. And, my little sister’s best friends family had a house on the edge of the lake.
Turns out it was November 21, 1980; here’s a link.
I’d like to chime in with my fellow geologist, beatle, and confirm this as a gen-u-wine non-UL. In 1980 my dad was working with Advanced Drilling Systems in S. LA and witnessed the hole thing.
It must have inspired the lake-draining scene in the Bond film View to a Kill. That came out in the mid-ish-80s.
Wow!!! Cool!!! Does anyone have videotape or film of this??
OK, did anyone check the direction of rotation of the vortex? We got right-hand rule people here what gotta know.
Ray (Look, Ma, no lake! Still sounds Cajun catfishy 
to me.)
Certainly nothing like the Lake Peigneur story, but we have a local salt mine disaster story in my area. An engineering consulting firm was examining a local salt mine and convinced the owners that they could safely remove more salt by reducing the size of the support pillars. A few months later (fortunately at night when the mine was unoccupied) the entire mine collapsed. I’m guessing the engineers didn’t put that job on their resumes.