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Elon Musk's tunneling firm, The Boring Company, wants to build transportation tunnels in cities across the country. Now Boring has turned its sites to something pretty different, flood control in Houston. As The Texas Newsroom's Lauren McGaughy reports, everything, this project included, is bigger in Texas.
LAUREN MCGAUGHY, BYLINE: It's been eight years since the worst hurricane to directly impact Houston.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: Big breaking news right now. Hurricane Harvey hitting the state of Texas hard. It is right now a Category 2 storm. It came ashore.
MCGAUGHY: The storm left thousands of homes in Houston underwater, dozens of people dead and locals begging for a solution.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Peak wind gusts of 132 mph. You had roofs being ripped off, shelters and different places collapsing.
MCGAUGHY: The devastation pushed officials to look for different solutions to Houston's flooding problems. One idea they've been studying for years is building a system of tunnels deep under the city to drain floodwater away from vulnerable areas during a storm, hopefully sparing homes and saving lives. For the city's main waterway, a river called Buffalo Bayou, the proposed tunnel would be massive, 30 to 40 feet in diameter and dozens of miles long. Officials warned that the project would not be quick or cheap. Here's Scott Elmer with the county's flood control district discussing the plan in 2022.
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SCOTT ELMER: It is important to note that at this time, in today's dollars, we estimate the cost of the tunnel system to be $30 billion. And that's billion with a B.
MCGAUGHY: A FEMA index shows the Houston area has very high hurricane and flood risk. So now, as the city is in the midst of yet another storm season, Elon Musk wants a piece of the project. The Boring Company has been quietly lobbying elected officials to hire them to build a portion of Houston's tunneling system. The pitch? Instead of one massive tunnel under Buffalo Bayou, Boring proposed building two 12-foot diameter tunnels for a cost of $760 million. That's according to an investigation by The Texas Newsroom in collaboration with the Houston Chronicle, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
Emails and pitch documents obtained through public records requests show the company told local and state politicians that implementing this idea could be more efficient. But flood engineer Larry Dunbar said Boring's smaller tunnels would move a fraction of the water that one 40-foot diameter tunnel could. He said Musk would have to build 10 of them to equal the flood control power of a larger tunnel.
LARRY DUNBAR: It will reduce flooding. But is it really more cost effective than building one large tunnel that can carry more than five times the amount of flow?
MCGAUGHY: We gave Musk and Boring weeks to respond before we published our story, but they never did. Musk only posted on X after it went live, saying Boring's tunnels will work and be cheaper. If his tunnels are too small, he said they will just build more of them. Dunbar questioned that logic. He said it sounds like Musk doesn't have a real plan.
DUNBAR: His plan seems to be, you know, I've got some tunnel equipment. I need to build tunnels. We'll build a couple of tunnels.
MCGAUGHY: The internal documents show that GOP Congressman Wesley Hunt, a close ally of President Donald Trump, has helped Musk promote the project behind closed doors for months. Hunt declined to comment on the conversations despite the Newsroom's efforts to reach him. Like Musk, Hunt posted on X after our story ran defending his decision to talk with a tech billionaire. State and county officials told us they have not given Musk any public money for the project. They said the contractor they could eventually choose will go through the formal bidding and public comment process. But they are looking into whether narrower tunnels, the same size as those that Boring makes, will work for the city's smaller waterways.
For NPR News, I'm Lauren McGaughy in Austin, Texas.
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