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Elon Musk's Boring Company Cancels Los Angeles Tunnel Following Lawsuit (gizmodo.com)
Elon Musk's Boring Company has settled a lawsuit preventing the company from building a tunnel beneath the 405 freeway in Los Angeles. "[T]he cancellation of the Westside tunnel project is a major blow to Musk's grand plan in the City of Angels," reports Gizmodo. From the report: The Los Angeles Times reports that the project's demise began shortly after the Boring Company obtained a preliminary exemption to skip California's environmental review process and start digging. The city's authorities have been friendly to Musk's plans, but a group of residents in the Westside area filed an environmental suit in May alleging that the tunnel violates state law. The crux of the group's argument was that the Westside tunnel is part of a larger project that the company outlined with a map late last year. According to the suit, California law forbids the approval of individual facets of a larger project, stating that a full environmental review can't "be evaded by chopping large projects into smaller pieces that taken individually appear to have no significant environmental impacts."
The Westside group did not get a ruling on its lawsuit; instead, it seems the two parties settled. The Boring Company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo, but it sent a statement to NBC News that reads: "The parties (The Boring Company, Brentwood Residents Coalition, Sunset Coalition, and Wendy-Sue Rosen) have amicably settled the matter of Brentwood Residents Coalition et al. v. City of Los Angeles (TBC -- The Boring Company). The Boring Company is no longer seeking the development of the Sepulveda test tunnel and instead seeks to construct an operational tunnel at Dodger Stadium."
The Westside group did not get a ruling on its lawsuit; instead, it seems the two parties settled. The Boring Company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo, but it sent a statement to NBC News that reads: "The parties (The Boring Company, Brentwood Residents Coalition, Sunset Coalition, and Wendy-Sue Rosen) have amicably settled the matter of Brentwood Residents Coalition et al. v. City of Los Angeles (TBC -- The Boring Company). The Boring Company is no longer seeking the development of the Sepulveda test tunnel and instead seeks to construct an operational tunnel at Dodger Stadium."
It's probably not an issue with wildlife, but an issue with digging under people's property. There have to be checks done to make sure that digging won't cause subsidence of buildings on the surface, or affect things like wells. There can also be issues with drainage and underground waterways that get diverted by the tunnel, which can have knock on effects.
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More correctly, it's not that they have an impact that is the question. It's WHAT their impact is going to be and how the infrastructure company is going to mitigate that impact. You have to prove that you can build this thing safely BEFORE you start digging.
It's called ethics. I know this is a new concept for most programmers reading this on /., but it's a thing civil guys have been dealing with for decades. It's not a new problem for us.
See here for an example:
http://www.hudsontunnelproject...
No one said the individual parts have no environmental impact. They said "no significant environment impact".
If the bar for "significant" is "10" and your project is deemed to be "20", you're not allowed to complete it in 4 parts, each with "5", to avoid mitigation of the impact.
If the individual parts don't have any environmental impact, neither does the whole.
That's not necessarily true. It's the same reason tic-tacs can represent their product as "sugar free": "Tic Tac® mints do contain sugar as listed in the ingredient statement. However, since the amount of sugar per serving (1 mint) is less than 0.5 grams, FDA labeling requirements permit the Nutrition Facts to state that there are 0 grams of sugar per serving."
If a given project is only allowed to cause so much of an environmental impact, but the project as a whole will exceed that limit, you're not allowed to split it up into smaller projects in such a way that each sub-project will be under that limit.
and strong regulations help keep it that way. I don't know enough about what Musk is proposing to comment on it's relative safety, but I can imagine there's lots of good reasons to control where somebody digs a tunnel. The most obvious ones are having your house collapse under you or a gas explosion.
Now, you might counter that with "We've been digging like this for ages and that never happens". But here's the crux: We've been digging like that for ages under one of two conditions:
a. Relatively little city build up (especially compared to Los Angeles).
b. Strict gov't regulation of the sort Musk just ran into.
See, here's the crazy part. Contrary to what you're being told in mainstream media regulations exist for a reason. Yes, there are cases where zoning is abused (usually old people who don't want the extra traffic from new shops) but there's lots of cases where it's _not_ being abused. Most regulations were created because there was already a problem or disaster and the regulation is a response to that. American laws aren't very proactive.
Again though, watch something like Fox News, CNN or MSNBC and you won't get this. That's their pro-corporate bias showing through.
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While I think this is a silly way to block this project, Los Angeles sits on vast oil reserves. It's the reason the city grew to be the largest on the West coast. The La Brea Tar Pits (located right next to downtown Los Angeles) are a part of this. When they first began digging the tunnel for the Los Angeles subway, they came back the next morning to find that tar had seeped through the tunnel walls dug the previous day. They had to put the project on hold for a year while they figured out how to deal with the tar seepage. A delay which ballooned the construction cost from $400 million to over $1 billion (making it the most expensive public transportation project in U.S. history at the time, until it was eclipsed by Boston's Big Dig).
So yeah, an environmental impact report is most appropriate in this case.
NIMBY doesn't know state boundaries. This is a wealthy neighborhood concerned about elevated traffic due to the tunnel. This happens everywhere in the US anytime you attempt any construction project near wealthy people.
You'll get this worse in other states east of California where property owners also own the mineral rights. Somewhere like Texas you'd get every single property owner anywhere close to project suing to be paid claiming an impact to their mineral rights. California like many of the states west of Colorado have state laws that separate out mineral and surface rights giving the property owner no challenge to tunnel type projects via mineral rights. Instead these wealthy property owners are using a state environmental law to claim no analysis of impacts like traffic to attack the project.
Honestly the property owners are right, if Musk does want to build this massive private tunnel network he needs to spend a little money and do a real environmental analysis on what the impacts will be. Such a system would likely dramatically change traffic patterns and could cause aquifers to be disrupted along with a bunch of other things that should be analyzed before building it.
Environmental documents aren't a bad thing, they are simply a process that requires planning and a look at the effects the project will have before you build it. This is a good thing, these documents and the process they entail can often make projects run smoother and win public support and once the document is approved many of the avenues for a lawsuit get closed off, which is one of the purposes of the document.
Still 5th. Not taking your fact-free word for it either.
You don't know what you are talking about.
NEPA was constructed to close off litigation as much as it was constructed to force rich folks that want to build things to look at the consequences of building it before building it. It's there to force people to look at the problems the construction will cause, to develop mitigation plans and to basically do some fucking planning before going out there and building something and then abandoning it (leaving it to the tax payer to clean up) because they didn't consider the impacts.
I'm going to sidestep the low-effort jokes about "how can a tunnel affect the environment" to point out that they do, in fact, affect the environment.
The tailings, or spoil, that is removed from the tunnel needs proper disposal. This material can be anything from rock to mud to coal and even soil contaminated with chemicals. Some of the rock releases acid when exposed to water, like the pyrite exposed by I-99 construction in PA. The Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland had to have expensive temporary work just to prevent spoil from destroying the local environment.
All tunnels require drainage. For example, the Washington DC Metrorail system pumps out millions of gallons of water every day, most of which requires treatment before being released into the environment. Speaking of Metrorail, tailings were illegally dumped into local waterways that damaged them permanently.
While the air in the Boring Co tunnels aren't intended to be breathable by passengers, serious consideration must be made for combustible gases and it must be documented.
Finally, the affect on the overburden of the tunnel must be considered when digging. Disturbing it can release methane gas, cause contamination of groundwater by sediment, cause water migration, and cause subsidence on the surface.
So, laugh all you want about tunnels and the environment, but tunnels are NOT invisible.
Kriston
Damaging aquifers? Contaminating water tables? Subsidence? Sinkholes? Triggering earthquakes? ...Yeah, no need to check for any of that, right?