Earth pours out of a tunnel tube at left at the SpaceX facility, next to the Boring Co., in Bastrop, Texas, on Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2022. The Boring Co. constructs and tests tunnels for use in cities for transportation and to alleviate traffic congestion.In August 2021, a handful of Bastrop County residents noticed something big beginning to unfold on their quiet Walker Watson Road.
Residents soon learned that the newcomer was The Boring Co., a tunnel firm owned by Elon Musk, one of the richest men on Earth. On June 22 of this year, then-county engineer Robert Pugh complained in a letter to Bastrop County Commissioner Clara Beckett about the heavy demands both companies had placed on the county’s Development Services and engineering departments.
So far, The Boring Co. has dug a tunnel between the two companies’ properties — totaling about 100 acres — and built a miniature neighborhood on its site, complete with a soon-to-open Montessori school. On March 18, 2021, Adena Lewis, the county’s director of tourism and economic development, broke the news of The Boring Co.’s interest in Bastrop in an email to County Judge Paul Pape and engineer Carolyn Dill, a contract county employee. Lewis said the company wanted to build on as many as 50 acres in western Bastrop County, a facility that would employ up to 30 workers and receive “possible monthly/bimonthly deliveries of 14’ wide loads weighing 180,000+ lbs.
The companies’ appeal is especially strong in Texas. SpaceX and Tesla have invested billions in operations in the state. The Boring Co. is no Tesla, SpaceX or Twitter. It lacks the glamour and success of its corporate siblings. Still, The Boring Co. is currently in talks with the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority over the company’s plan to build a tunnel loop connecting San Antonio International Airport to downtown.The $800,000 facility it’s built in Bastrop is essentially a testing site for its tunnel-digging machinery.
He said the company promised to not operate construction equipment late at night, and to make road repairs and adjust the placement of its driveway.“The leadership team has told us lies, like that the noise will be like farm equipment — only during business hours,” he said. “You can hear it running all night.”In an email dated March 1, 2022, Pugh, the county engineer at the time, told The Boring Co.
“The team assures that this will not happen in the future and is deeply sorry for this error,” she wrote on March 7. The companies inundated Development Services and engineering employees with “monthly, if not weekly” requests to approve development and septic revisions, and “weekly, if not daily” emails pressing the county to approve last-minute changes, Pugh said in his letter to County Commissioner Clara Beckett early last summer.
Many of the permit requests related to the warehouse and houses, as well as space for testing tunnel equipment. One document depicts space on The Boring Co. property for the construction of three tunnels. But a notation on the plan said, “TBC plans to construct as many tunnels as necessary for Research and Development purposes.”In a video Musk posted on Twitter in October, the billionaire appears to be visiting the SpaceX site in Bastrop with a gaggle of his children and associates.
You just know that’s gonna be a superfund sight in a decade or two