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Elon Musk's Boring Machine Completes the First Section of An LA Tunnel (theverge.com)
New submitter simkel shares a report from The Verge: Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk says his ambitious tunnel-boring endeavor, aptly named The Boring Company, has officially started digging underneath Los Angeles. Musk announced the news on Twitter, where he said "Godot," the Samuel Beckett-inspired name of the company's tunnel boring machine, had completed the the first segment of a tunnel in the Southern California metropolis. Prior to today, it was unclear how long it would take Musk to convince the city to allow him to move the experimental effort beyond the SpaceX parking lot in Hawthorne. We don't have details on what Musk hammered out with the city of LA. But he did tweet earlier this month about a meeting with L.A Mayor Eric Garcetti to lay the groundwork for the necessary permits and regulatory approvals he'd need to start digging with Godot, which weighs about 1,200 tons and runs about 400 feet long. Musk said last month that the first tunnel would run from LAX to Culver City, Santa Monica, Westwood, and Sherman Oaks, with later tunnels covering more of the greater LA area. Now, it looks like the LAX to Culver City route appears underway.
Yeah . And none of his businesses ever made money. If PayPal didn't buy his payment system back in the dot.bomb era, he'd be some Schlub at Starbucks askng , " do you want room for cream?"
track record indeed. Silly Valley people are worse than the Evangelical Christians I'm surrounded by.
A segment refers to the concrete liner rings. So actually, using Seattle's project with the world's largest boring machine as an upper limit seems more like a couple orders of magnitude less. The tunnel is lined with 2-ft thick by 6.5ft long concrete panels or segments.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
LOL, This IS LA you know... Right smack dab in the middle of some pretty nasty earthquake prone fault lines... It's going to obviously produce a LOT of tailings that will have to be put someplace and likely have to be below the water table meaning it will have waste water being pumped out of it....AND this is California we are discussing... There will be scads of environmental impact studies required for this...
Then there are all the permits he's going to need from all the various cities, county, state and federal interests for just the traffic impacts of his "private" transportation system.... And Building permits..... Engineering studies..... Inspections.... Mining permits... Safety plans... Dang the list goes on and on..
This is just a cover story....He's never going to build the tunnel... At least not one that goes anywhere related to getting to the airport on time.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
let me search that for you, lazy internet user.
How is it safe to be underground when the earth starts shaking? Turns out underground structures are safe because they move with the soil, while structures above ground sway back and forth.
Imagine a plate of fruit-filled gelatin dessert. Tunnels are like the pieces of fruit at the base of the gelatin, while above-ground structures are like the fruit toward the top. If you shake the plate, the movement becomes more exaggerated as it flows up from the base of the gelatin. In an earthquake, this translates to tunnel movement measured in inches, while the movement above ground might be measured in feet.
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/Status/Blog/tunnels-and-earthquakes