Elon Musk’s company wants to build tunnels to alleviate Houston’s floodwater problems : NPR

Ailsa Chang, host:

The Elon Musk Tunneling Society, The Boring Company wants to build transport tunnels in cities across the country. Now Boring has transformed his sites to something quite different, control of floods in Houston. As Lauren McGAUGHY reports from the Texas press room, everything, this project included, is larger in Texas.

Lauren McGAUGHY, Byline: it’s been eight years since the worst hurricane to have a direct impact on Houston.

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Unidentified reporter # 1: Big Breaking News right now. Hurricane Harvey hits hard in the state of Texas. This is at the moment a storm of category 2. He came to the ground.

McGaughy: The storm has left thousands of houses in Houston underwater, dozens of dead and the inhabitants begging a solution.

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Unidentified reporter # 2: Pic’s gusts of 132 MPH. You have had torn roofs, shelters and different places collapsed.

McGaughy: Devastation prompted managers to seek different solutions to Houston flooding problems. An idea that they have been studying for years is to build a system of tunnels deeply under the city to drain flood waters far from vulnerable areas during a storm, let’s hope, save the houses and save lives. For the city’s main navigable track, a river called Buffalo Bayou, the offered tunnel would be massive, 30 to 40 feet in diameter and tens of kilometers long. Officials have warned that the project would not be fast or cheap. Here is Scott Elmer with the county flood control district discussing the plan in 2022.

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Scott Elmer: It is important to note that today, in today’s dollars, we estimate that the cost of the tunnel system is $ 30 billion. And it’s a billion with a B.

McGAUGHY: A FEMA index shows that the Houston region has a very high risk of hurricane and flood. So now, as the city is in the middle of another storm season, Elon Musk wants a piece of the project. The boring company quietly pressure on elected officials to hire them to build part of the Houston tunneling system. The land? Instead of a massive tunnel under Buffalo Bayou, Boring proposed to build two 12 -foot diameter tunnels at a cost of $ 760 million. It is according to a survey of the Texas press room in collaboration with the Houston Chronicle, Propublica and Texas Tribune.

The e-mails and pitch documents obtained through requests for public files show that the company has declared to local and state politicians that the implementation of this idea could be more effective. But the flood engineer, Larry Dunbar, said that the small boring tunnels would move a fraction of the water that a 40 -foot diameter tunnel could. He said Musk should build 10 to match the control power of the floods of a larger tunnel.

Larry Dunbar: This will reduce the floods. But is it really more profitable than the construction of a large tunnel which can transport more than five times the amount of flow?

McGaughy: We have given Musc and boring weeks to answer before publishing our history, but they never did. Musk only published on X after putting it online, saying that Boring tunnels will work and will be cheaper. If his tunnels are too small, he said they are building more. Dunbar questioned this logic. He said he seems that Musk had no real plan.

Dunbar: His plan seems to be, you know, I have tunnel equipment. I need to build tunnels. We will build some tunnels.

McGAUGHY: Internal documents show that the GOP Congress member, Wesley Hunt, a close ally of President Donald Trump, helped Musk promote the project on closed doors for months. Hunt refused to comment on the conversations despite the efforts of the editorial room to join him. Like Musk, Hunt posted on X after our history was in defense of his decision to speak with a technological billionaire. State and county officials told us that they had not given Musc of public money for the project. They said that the entrepreneur they could choose would go through the official auction process and public comments. But they examine if the narrower tunnels, of the same size as those that are boring, will work for the small sailors of the city.

For NPR News, I am Lauren McGaughy in Austin, Texas.

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