Big dig
When the oil rig operated by Texaco drilled too far into the ground in Louisiana, the salt pillars holding up Lake Peigneur collapsed. The sinkhole emerged and the lake went from just 6-feet deep to a colossal 200-feet deep. Texaco paid $44.8 million for an extremely expensive and upsetting mistake.
Train trouble
You can’t fit a square peg into a round hole, and you certainly can’t fit big trains into narrow railways. That was the lesson learned by SNCF, a French train company, after purchasing 2,000 trains for $20 billion. Turns out they were too large to fit into most of the train stations through which they were intended to travel. The company had to invest another $68 million to extend the train platforms in an attempt to make the trains fit.
Bitcoin blitz
While many of us are still trying to make the heads or tails of Bitcoin, we still don’t even know who actually developed it, but investing in the digital currency in its modest beginnings would appear to be a huge payoff right now. Unfortunately for James Howells, an IT worker in Wales, he lost his 7.500 bitcoin stash when he broke his hard drive. According to CNBC, the collection would have been worth $127 million today.
