Elon Musk’s Boring Company, a tunneling and infrastructure firm, has repeatedly violated state environmental regulations, even after agreeing not to, according to Nevada regulators. The company, which is expanding a tunnel network under Las Vegas, is accused of nearly 800 violations based on a report from ProPublica. Nearly 100 of these violations occurred after the company signed a 2022 agreement with state regulators that was intended to force the company to comply with state laws.
The alleged violations include digging without approval, dumping untreated water onto city streets, failing to install required silt fences, and tracking dirt from construction sites onto nearby roadways. The Boring Company could have faced fines exceeding three million dollars, but regulators decided to group some violations together, which reduced the total fine to two hundred and forty-two thousand eight hundred dollars. The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection stated that reducing the total offers a reasonable penalty that will still serve to deter future non-compliance.
The Las Vegas tunnel system is planned to grow from its current few miles to a sixty-eight mile network connecting one hundred and four stations. However, this expansion has encountered other problems. Operations on a tunnel being built to the Las Vegas airport were suspended in September after a worker sustained a crushing injury when they became pinned between two four-thousand-foot pipes.