- A geologist tries to prevent a huge sinkhole from devouring New Orleans during Mardi Gras.
- At the outskirts of New Orleans a sewage tunnel caves in; city officials are less concerned about the worker who was killed then about possible repercussions on the impending Mardi Gras in the French Quarter, which is the tourist hight point of the year in Louisiana, so the priority is to prevent a panic. Still Allison Beauchamp, under whose responsibility public works fall in city hall, calls on her intimate friend, geologist Matt Andrews, who is extremely cautious since an accident only he blames himself for, to investigate. Shortly after another cave in, he finds and reports -even arranging radar material was opposed by the Mardi Gras lobby- that such sink holes are caused by the lingering on of a fire in underground tunnels trough peat layers, so there's no way of telling where and when more sink-holes will collapse, but it may happen all over the city, and two million tourists joining in the reveling increase the risk, so everyone is in danger. However city press secretary George Regan, who knows mayor John Lafitte would probably follow her advice to evacuate, falsifies the report so Allison allows the Mardi Gras committee to go ahead with the annual festivities...—KGF Vissers
- Corbett stars as Matt Andrews, a geologist who is asked to investigate why there have been two large sinkholes affecting the city of New Orleans. Jessica Steen plays his girlfriend Allison Beauchamp, assistant to the Mayor, who has to decide whether the problems with the sinkholes will spread far enough to require that the remainder of Mardi Gras be cancelled, which would be an economic disaster to the city.
Matt has a number of personal issues because of a disaster which happened at a mine he was advising on its operations. Although cleared of responsibility for the accident, he still blames himself, which may be causing him to be overcautious. Matt admits the potential problem of the sinkholes becoming so serious as to endanger the city could occur next week, or not for three hundred years. Based on the lack of real evidence of immediate danger, and because some evidence that she should have received has been destroyed by the mayor's political flack, Allison has decided not to close the festival, only to have the disaster metastasize, like a cancer devouring the city's underground.
The only answer is to obtain a binary liquid which when combined produces a foam that will fill the huge sinkhole cavern. The foam will expand to hundreds of times its size, and becomes as hard as concrete. Due to an emergency, while Matt is underground inspecting the caverns, he becomes partially trapped, and has to ask to have the foam started (which will kill him if he can't find an escape) because if they don't start the flow of the liquid immediately, the ground underneath downtown New Orleans will collapse similar to the effects of soil liquefaction and thousands to tens of thousands of people will be injured or killed. The last few minutes of the film become a race against time as Matt attempts to find an exit before the foam overwhelms him.
The film points to an event that would happen five years after the movie was made. Matt points out the sinkholes, if they do fail and open up, could be as serious a disaster to the city as if its levees collapsed, an event that did happen as a result of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
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