Lake Texoma whirlpool caused by draining lake

Published 4:00 pm Thursday, June 25, 2015

If you’ve been looking at social media today, you have seen a “flood” of posts about a giant swirling vortex in Lake Texoma, on the border of Oklahoma and Texas.

The gaping hole alarmed everyone from Twitter users to the Tulsa District US Army Corps of Engineers, who posted a YouTube video of the vortex. Below the video, they describe the hole as being “8 feet in diameter and capable of sucking in a full-sized boat.”

But despite how crazy it looks, there’s a perfectly normal explanation for the spooky hole: The water was being drained from the lake earlier this month when heavy rains had brought the lake above safe levels. The video you see here was shot in early June, not today or even this week.

Texas and Oklahoma have seen so much rain this year that for the first time in history, the lake flowed over the spillway twice in early June. The vortex was created after the spillway opened and the water rushed out so quickly it created a churning effect, the aquatic equivalent of a black hole.