Miraculous Vanishing of Lake Peigneur by Allan Wolf & Jose Pimienta

 The Miraculous Vanishing of Lake Peigneur: The Real True Story of a Lake That Disappeared by Allan Wolf and Jose Pimienta is a new nonfiction middle grade graphic novel. It tells the story of “the 1980 disaster when a freshwater lake in Louisiana drained dry following a mining error and various boats were sucked into a vortex only to be spat back to the surface several days later”.

In November 1980, an oil rig performed exploratory drilling in the lake, situated above a salt mine. The drill bit got stuck, an opening formed in the bottom of the lake, which then drained into the hole, filling the caverns left by the removal of salt over sixty years, temporarily creating the biggest waterfall in Louisiana. The sinkhole swallowed the drilling platform, eleven barges, a tugboat,  trees, and 65 acres of land. No one died, dave for three dogs, and all employed of the mine at the time escaped after the mine’s electrician sounded the alarm. A fisherman on the lake at the time managed to get his boat to shore in time. Eventually, nine of the eleven sunken barges reemerged. The oil rig company and drilling contractors had to pat $32 million to the salt mine, and $13 to a nearby plant nursery.

Allan Wolf is an poet and young adult author who mostly tells stories of multi-perspective historical fiction in verse. This is his first graphic novel. Jose Pimienta works on comics and storyboards for animation and film, and previous comics work include the graphic novel Suncatcher and MG graphic novel Twin Cities, and the upcoming Luminous Beings.

Katie Cunningham at Candlewick will publish The Miraculous Vanishing of Lake Peigneur: The Real True Story of a Lake That Disappeared in the autumn of 2025, for the 45th anniversary of the event. Allan Wolf represented himself, while Jose Pimienta‘s agent Elizabeth Bennett at Transatlantic Agency negotiated the deal.