- Drunkboxer
- Jun 30, 2007
-
|
Ok this is missing the pictures but other than that it's the full article:
Elon Musk’s Vegas Tunnel Project Has Been Racking Up Safety Violations
The Boring Company’s tiny Las Vegas Loop is all that’s come of Musk’s promises to build superfast mass-transit “hyperloops.” Workers say its tunnels are packed with chemical sludge.
By Max Chafkin and Sarah McBride
February 26, 2024 at 4:00 AM CST
Updated on February 26, 2024 at 7:50 AM CST
The muck pooling in the tunnel at the north end of the Las Vegas Strip had the consistency of a milkshake and, in some places, sat at least two feet deep. The tunnel-to-be, which would eventually stretch about half a mile, was part of a system intended to connect two hotels, the Encore Las Vegas and the Westgate, with the enormous Las Vegas Convention Center. Workers doing the digging later said they had to wade through the mud every day. It splashed up over their boots, hit their arms and faces and soaked through their clothes. At first, it merely felt damp. But in addition to the water, sand and silt—the natural byproducts of any dig—the workers understood that it was full of chemicals known as accelerants.
The accelerants cure the grout that seals the tunnel’s concrete supports, helping the grout set properly and protecting the work against cracks and other deterioration. They also seriously burn exposed human skin. At the Encore dig site, such burns became almost routine, workers there told Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration. An investigation by the state OSHA, which Bloomberg Businessweek has obtained via a freedom of information request, describes workers being scarred permanently on their arms and legs. According to the investigation, at least one employee took a direct hit to the face. In an interview with Businessweek, one of the tunnel workers recalls the feeling of exposure to the chemicals: “You’d be like, ‘Why am I on fire?’”
Boring tunnel workers say they had to wade through deep puddles of toxic muck.Source: Nevada Occupational Safety and Health Administration
Like others interviewed for this story, the tunnel worker spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals from the billionaire who operates it: Elon Musk. For nearly a decade, Musk’s tunneling venture, the Boring Company, has made grand pronouncements about building an underground mass-transit system he calls “the hyperloop.” Musk once described this technology as a system of futuristic pods capable of ferrying people between major cities at the speed of sound. He suggested that a hyperloop would allow people to commute between New York City and Washington, DC, or between San Francisco and Los Angeles, in about half an hour.
That these boasts were taken seriously enough for Boring to raise about $800 million in outside capital, with its most recent valuation reaching $6 billion, speaks to the mythology surrounding Musk. These days, however, his luster has dimmed somewhat. His takeover of Twitter has been marked by huge losses and reports that board members are concerned about his mental health and drug use. Musk has laughed these off. His car company, Tesla, is stagnating. As Musk put it, optimistically, on an earnings call, the company is “between two major growth waves.” In January, a federal judge voided the $55 billion pay package that Tesla had awarded Musk, calling it “unfathomable” and concluding that the automaker’s board was too friendly to its CEO. The latest controversy: On Feb. 24 Forbes reported that the chair of the House China committee had accused Musk's satellite internet service, Starlink, of possibly breaching a government contract by withholding services to Taiwan. Musk has yet to respond to that claim.
Through all of this, Musk has said relatively little about the Boring Company, perhaps because of the gaping distance between his promises and execution. After more than seven years in business, the company’s only commercial project amounts to a drastically scaled-down shuttle bus system for the Vegas convention center. Mostly, it takes passengers from one side of the convention center to the other. There’s also a spur that takes guests between the convention center and the Resorts World hotel, which sits on the far side of Las Vegas Boulevard. The system operates only during conventions, and attendees ride in Tesla sedans limited to 40 miles per hour. The company has said the system can handle more than 4,500 passengers hourly.
The Encore and Westgate tunnels are extensions, part of a theoretical project to widen coverage to most of the Strip and downtown Las Vegas. But progress has been slow—so slow that Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman says she doubts it’ll ever happen. “It’s impractical,” says Goodman, who is claustrophobic and has yet to ride in any of the tunnels. “I pray that it works, but I see these stumbling blocks.” Among them, she says, are issues of capacity and safety.
Although no one has been killed at a Boring Company worksite in Las Vegas, the OSHA report shows some very close calls. Last summer, according to employees interviewed by the investigators, an intern was nearly crushed when a bin made out of two-ton concrete blocks collapsed. It had been overloaded with muck, the employees said, and the metal brackets holding it together gave way, sending the intern running. (The intern didn’t respond to inquiries for this story.) Altogether, OSHA found eight violations it categorized as “serious” and fined the Boring Company a total of $112,504 last fall.
The collapsed muck bin, before (left) and after.Source: Nevada Occupational Safety and Health Administration
The company, which didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from Businessweek, is contesting the findings. “Nevada OSHA has failed to establish that the alleged violations occurred,” Boring’s outside counsel wrote in a Nov. 21 letter to the agency, which Businessweek also obtained through its freedom-of-information request. “TBC contests all of the citations’ classifications, required abatement, abatement deadlines, proposed penalties, and every other matter subject to contest.”
The injuries and near misses described in the OSHA documents call into question the company’s claims about its innovative tunneling processes, which Musk has long said would make large-scale industrial projects cheaper and faster. Several former staffers say this is bunk—that what mainly distinguishes the Boring Company’s efforts is a willingness to put workers in danger. “It was a serious situation,” says one former employee. “I will never, ever drive in one of those tunnels.”
Listen • 29m13
Elon, Inc: All About Starlink (Podcast)
Listen and subscribe to Elon, Inc. on Apple , Spotify , iHeart and the Bloomberg Terminal
.
Musk unveiled the Boring Company in late 2016, using a playbook he has since honed into an absurdist form of corporate performance art. “Traffic is driving me nuts,” he tweeted in December 2016, posting mid-commute somewhere in LA. “Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging.” In early 2017, Musk invited a Businessweek reporter to join him and Steve Davis, a longtime deputy who would become Boring’s president, on a trip down into a nearby dig site, as they went shopping for a used tunnel-boring machine. In an interview that day, he swung wildly between low-key determination and loopy mania. He joked that the company would create “a trillion jobs” and suggested that the Boring Company might start a trademark beef with either AT&T or Toys “R” Us, the bankrupt retailer.
Musk’s “hyperloop” design inspired a number of independent companies, including Hyperloop One, which folded at the end of last year.Photographer: John Gurzinski/Getty Images
During this time, Musk was flirting with a new political identity. The incoming Trump administration was teasing a possible $1 trillion infrastructure program and Musk, who’d styled himself as a left-leaning environmentalist during the Obama years, wanted some of that money. He made several trips to Trump Tower and the White House, joined two presidential business advisory boards, and even endorsed ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson’s nomination as secretary of state. Ultimately, though, neither Trump nor Musk seems to have been able to stand the other. Musk resigned from the advisory boards in a huff over Trump’s opposition to climate change regulation, and Trump taunted Musk as a “bullshit artist” and a suckup. “Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects.” he later posted on Truth Social, his right-wing Twitter alternative. “I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it.”
In 2017, Musk tweeted that he “just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop.” This turned out not to be true, and set the tone for a series of Boring efforts over the next few years. As relations with Trump cooled, Musk courted Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Within short order, Boring announced a Baltimore-to-Washington Loop, a “Dugout Loop” that would serve Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, and a high-speed train to connect Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to the city’s downtown. None of this panned out. The Chicago project was killed in 2019, after Emanuel left office (his successor, Lori Lightfoot, has described Musk’s financing plan as a “fantasy”), while the Maryland and Los Angeles projects died in their planning stages.
Elon Musk's Hyperloop Tunnel Is Full of Sludge, Workers Say
4:55
Davis pitched the Las Vegas Convention and Visitor Authority in 2019. The plan was for the visitors board to pay about $50 million for a pair of tunnels, each less than a mile long, plus $4 million per year for Boring to operate the system. Mayor Goodman, who sits on the visitors board, opposed the project, pointing out that Boring lacked obvious qualifications. She circulated a flyer comparing the Austrian tram-building company Doppelmayr (125 years in operation and 15,000 working projects, according to the flyer) with Boring (three years in operation, zero working projects), and stressed that other US cities had said no. “Everybody turned them down,” she now recalls thinking. “What are we, dumb here?”
The convention and visitor authority, which didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, approved the project over Goodman’s objections. A few months later, its president, Steve Hill, stood on a podium with Davis, and the two men inserted matching keys that started the company’s tunnel-boring machine, Godot. Hill called the launch a “Kitty Hawk-type moment” that “has the ability to change transportation.” Davis suggested it was the first step to helping “solve the congestion problem.”
The Vegas Loop in action during the CES conference in January.Photographer: Travis P Ball/AP
When it set to work near the Las Vegas Strip, Boring’s only commercial success had been in selling swag, notably a $500 branded flamethrower. (Yes, really. It has also sold a fragrance called Burnt Hair.) But former employees say the Vegas job should have been easy enough. Despite Musk’s existentialist branding, Godot wasn’t anything special. It was a standard-issue machine made by the Canadian brand Lovat.
Then came the grand promises. Boring unveiled another machine, dubbed Prufrock, and said it could work six times as fast and tunnel a full mile per week. Five people who’ve seen the machine in action say that’s nowhere near how things worked out, particularly with the latest version, Prufrock 2, which dug the Encore tunnel. Although the machine could dig faster in theory, they say, it required more employees to manage it. Including pre-tunneling prep work, it took 18 months to finish the first section of the Loop, totaling 1.7 miles of tunnel, then another year to build the spur connecting the convention center with Resorts World, giving the company a rough speed of 1 mile of tunnel per year.
Workers say that particularly during the spring and summer of 2023, as Boring began digging its connector tunnels to the Encore and Westgate hotels, they faced tremendous pressure to speed things along, before conference season started in the fall. Encore crews tunneled for 24 hours a day, with each employee working 12-hour shifts six or sometimes seven days a week, some later told Nevada OSHA inspectors. Besides the long hours, these workers complained to the state agency about faulty machinery and a lack of personal protective equipment. One of the former employees says the company “was trying to do everything on the cheap.”
Last May, a Boring technician was driving a forklift into the tunnel when its brakes failed, causing the machine to careen down the hill before it fell onto its side, according to the state OSHA investigation. Oil and hydraulic fluids spilled from the forklift, and skid marks stained the roadway. According to someone familiar with the accident, the driver escaped serious injury only because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. He was thrown a few feet from the forklift, which might otherwise have crushed him as it tumbled over. Nevada OSHA declined to penalize Boring, however, because it found no documented prior complaints or maintenance requests for the forklift, which Boring replaced. In its own internal report, the company said it would implement a forklift maintenance schedule.
Employees interviewed by Nevada OSHA described conditions in the Encore tunnel ranging from unpleasant to unsafe. Workers were forced to spend entire 12-hour shifts in the tunnel, including lunch breaks, and ask for permission to use the bathroom. They had to beware of muck falling from a conveyor system overhead, which moved the sludge from the front of the dig site back toward the exit. When the muck reached the bins outside the tunnels, those receptacles were often dangerously full, as in the case of the collapse that almost killed the intern. Temperatures in the tunnels soared to well over 100F. Some called the site “the Plantation.”
And then there were the chemical puddles. The tunnels were dug at the level of the water table, not unusual in the tunneling industry, which meant that water was constantly seeping into the tunnel, mixing with the dirt and accelerants. Workers had installed pumps, but they couldn’t pull the water out quickly enough, particularly when summer rains exacerbated the situation. So they regularly had to wade through the polluted water. The accelerants came in with the grout via long hoses, which in the Encore tunnel often resulted in employees getting sprayed as they maneuvered the hoses from spot to spot. Over the course of a month, 10 to 15 workers suffered chemical burns that way, according to the state OSHA report.
In early July, Boring released a video showing its machines breaking through into a parking lot at the Encore site, noting that the 2,350 feet of digging (more than four-tenths of a mile) had taken just 10 weeks and calling it a “good step towards building infrastructure projects in a matter of weeks versus years.” But that hasn’t happened. Seven months after Prufrock finished boring the Encore tunnel, the company hasn’t completed the station there.
The Las Vegas Loop remains a long way from the citywide transit system that Musk promised. The Westgate will soon open its Boring tunnel, a hotel spokesman said. Boring recently started prep work to expand the loop to the Virgin hotel and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, but neither project has announced a timetable. The company has pitched numerous hotels and other sites on tunnels, according to former employees, including with the dominant casino groups Caesars and MGM, but hasn’t announced any related contracts.
In the meantime, what Boring has built amounts to a modest convenience for conventioneers. During a conference in early February, the Loop station at the Resorts World hotel was nearly empty as several groups of riders waited for a car to take them through the tunnel. An attendant explained that although the conference floor itself was reasonably busy, few were taking advantage of the Loop. Boring had started that day with 20 drivers, but had sent six of them home—they didn’t have anything to do.
(Updates with reports about Starlink in Taiwan in fourth paragraph. A previous version corrected the amount of money that Boring had raised from outside investors.)
cant wait to do this on mars
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 02:05
