SWALLOWED UP BY THE EARTH.

On December 1, 1965, there was a deafening noise around half past four. The gas was screaming around your ears, so to speak. A fountain of mud and water sprayed meters high into the sky with giant force. The mud was raining, there was a deafening noise. The thick steel derrick, almost fifty meters high, snapped forward for a moment and disappeared in a few seconds graceful in the gas crater. SWALLOWED UP BY THE TROUBLED EARTH. Was never seen from again.

My father told this story for 92 years when he asked me if I wanted to take him to the crater grove. He used to go there regularly with his own car, but he no longer trusted himself in traffic. Personally, I never thought about it myself, come by it often, but when my father asked, I said, yes, the weather is lovely now. When I stood by the pool, I said to him, strange, actually, that there is such a tower in here. He looked at me and said, come on. We walked down a kind of path and ended up at a large lawn, here under this lawn lies the derrick, I don't know how deep, but everything really went with offices and chain where the men ate, cars, caravans, you name it, luckily no people, we can be very grateful for that. He continued through a narrow path where the walker could just go through, looked out over the meadows and pointed to the field into the field.

There we were on that day, we were at that time pulling the last beets for the cows, I just pulled a beet out of the ground and saw a kind of bubble rising with it and around us more and more. We looked at the platform and saw that there was a panic and the tower was crooked, bad thing said, grandpa, come on, we have to get out of here. As we walked away, the bubbles grew bigger and the noise got louder and louder, we looked back and saw the tower falling right down. In grandpa's eyes, I saw disbelief and worrying like I've never seen him before, he said, you're not going to mean this, he pointed to Uncle Albert, you go to the farm and you're coming with me to see if there are any survivors. When we walked around, the first workers came to meet us, walking all under the mud, we couldn't do anything. Fortunately, everyone survived.

Afterwards, I started to delve into it and it turned out that the Rooster, a small hamlet, was equally world news. So the pool, which thought the derrick was in it for years, turned out to be an illusion: it was used to close the borehole. But when I walked across the field, I got a bit of a strange feeling that here in the depths, gosh, who knows how deep a complete platform of drilling revolutions had disappeared into the Earth.