Big muddy

Holy crap! A story of oil drilling gone wrong -- from the LA Times:

The Gray Ooze That Ate the Indonesian Villages
Nothing, it seems, can stop the mud.

For more than three months, the hot, noxious goop has spewed up through a crack in the earth at a natural-gas exploration site, swamping everything in its path.

The expanding, surreal gray lake with the stench of rotten eggs has enveloped more than 10 square miles of land in eastern Java, Indonesia's most densely populated island. The flow has forced 8,000 to 10,000 people from their homes, engulfed about a dozen factories, contaminated fish farms and intermittently closed a major highway.

Confusion has reigned over how to stop it. An effort to drill a series of relief wells was slow to begin and has thus far failed. With the mud continuing to gush, emergency crews have scrambled to put up earthen barriers to contain and redirect the flow away from villages. Some of the dams already have been breached, and officials are running out of space.

In a country reeling from a string of natural disasters, this man-made fiasco has thrown a fresh, harsh light on an overwhelmed government struggling to counter accusations of corruption and ineptitude.

A bit more:

It is unclear what went wrong during the drilling of a 2-mile-deep exploration well. Several environmental and community groups have accused the company of shoddy work and lax oversight, saying a protective lining that could have prevented the disaster was not properly in place.

Company officials initially suggested the mudflow had resulted from an earthquake days before, but quickly abandoned the idea.

The company has since taken responsibility for the damage but won't say what caused it, citing a police investigation.

The disaster, and the government's inability to cope with it, have angered residents. Their frustration has deepened with reports that Aburizal Bakrie, the government minister responsible for coordinating responses to natural and man-made disasters, owns a stake in the gas exploration project.

Adang Setiana, a deputy to Bakrie, said the government's response had not been influenced by the minister's connections. Bakrie is one of the country's wealthiest men.

At the shore of the mud lake, white smoke billows ominously. Large bubbles burp at the center, marking the roughly 50-foot-wide crack, where temperatures reach about 140 degrees. Only rooftops and the tips of denuded trees poke above the surface of the mud, which is 20 feet deep in places.

Tests have found elevated levels of phenol, which can irritate human skin and cause breathing discomfort, according to a report by WALHI, a leading environmental group. There have been no reports of hospitalizations, although two people have died in accidents related to the mudflow: an emergency crew member reportedly caught in an explosion of a pent-up gas deposit and another run over by a bulldozer.

Makes me wonder why they were drilling in such a geologically active area... I am not an oil expert but most wells seem to be in very geologically old and stable places, not active geothermal areas. Maybe they were after something deeper and had to penetrate an active zone -- the engineering behind that would be remarkable and something obviously went horribly wrong.