I keep hearing that people are very upset about the Nazi River Rampage. Oops, I mean the tunnel from downtown Nashville to the airport that Elon Musk’s Boring Company might someday build. I need you all to stop complaining right now.
Have you looked around at what’s going on? As of Friday night, we barely have a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention anymore. The government is shut down. Congress is on an extended break. Journalists are getting arrested in the streets, and neighbors are having to hide people in their homes. It’s a nightmare out here, man.
I need one thing I can count on for amusement, and if you all scare The Boring Company off with your facts and your logic and your not wanting Murfreesboro Pike to collapse into said tunnel, I will have nothing to bring me joy.Â
Project funding, safety, utility concerns addressed in 18-page document
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I read the inaugural Music City Loop blog post on a website that, ostensibly, The Boring Company paid someone to make, and it is a goddamn delight. Just start with the fact that, formatting wise, a very standard design guideline is that people need lines of text to be about 15 words across. You get much longer than that and people can’t follow it, or they tire of reading quickly. I’ve looked at this blog post on three different screens, and on every screen, it’s about 30 words across.
Much like how you might not consciously notice that the Overlook Hotel in The Shining has an interior layout that doesn’t make sense — windows on inside walls, doors to rooms that can’t exist because of where rooms we see are, etc. — but it still serves to make you feel unsettled and that something is wrong here, the 30-word line works the same. It makes me feel as if no one is actually supposed to read it. This sense is only reinforced by the gray-on-gray color scheme.Â
But that didn’t stop me from learning the phrase “exploratory pit.” The Boring Company writes that one bit of notable work they’ve done is the “construction of an exploratory pit to better understand site geology, which will inform TBM launch operations.” Over the past week, every time I've felt down about anything, I've just thought of the term “exploratory pit.” It brings a smile to my face every time.
“Exploratory pit.” Â
Just a note. If you’re standing someplace in Nashville and you turn in a circle and see land above you in every direction, you are already standing in someone’s exploratory pit. In this case, probably Samuel Watkins’ exploratory pit, since it was in that area that the rock for the state Capitol was quarried. The good thing about this is that before you spend a bunch of time digging down, you can just go talk to the family company — Rock City Construction — that has worked on restorations at the Capitol twice. You want to know all the ways the limestone you’re about to dig into can go wrong? We have people with a lot of experience dealing with it.
But if I’m ever in such a funk that the term “exploratory pit” fails to bring me joy, I turn to the potential literal pitfalls. Imagine that Nashville between downtown and the airport is a loaf of sourdough bread. It looks solid enough from the outside, but we can guess that there are a ton of holes. Where they are and how big they are is a mystery until you cut into it. The Boring Company will be cutting through our metaphorical loaf with a very expensive, specially modified grain of rice, assuming they can guide the grain of rice in a line from the entrance into the bread to the exit by the airport.
What happens when the grain of rice hits a hole? If it’s not too big, maybe nothing. But if it’s substantial, will the grain will fall into it?
Tell me — tell me without laughing — that you have no desire to see The Boring Company, the city and the state trying to rescue their boring machine from some underground cavern.
Nashville has seen a lot of bored, starry-eyed rich people build ridiculous things here. Jere Baxter built a whole damn railroad just because he was the least accomplished son in his family. Bored rich men have put up race tracks and built the Metro Center Levee. They built Lindsley Hall and then made an imposter Lindsley Hall. They paved roads (OK, the people they enslaved paved roads) so they could get out to their country estates more easily. They put in street cars and got them removed.Â
The Boring Company’s Tesla tunnel is coming our way, like it or not. Here are our thoughts on what it can actually be used for.
You know how hot it is here in the summers? You’re going to tell me that they wouldn’t have made themselves vast underground palaces to hide from the heat? There’s a whole joke in Robert Altman’s Nashville about traffic from the airport, and that movie was made 50 years ago. You think no intrepid lunatic before Elon Musk has dreamed of getting too and from the airport without needing to get on the road with the rest of us? If it was easy to tunnel under Nashville, it would have been done.
Listen, I know that things aren’t going so great with the Las Vegas Loop. Pro Publica has a whole story about the hundreds of alleged violations The Boring Company has incurred. The story includes this horrific paragraph:
"Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and burns. The Boring Co. has contested the violations. Just last month, a construction worker suffered a 'crush injury' after being pinned between two 4,000-foot pipes, according to police records. Firefighters used a crane to extract him from the tunnel opening."
This is exactly how superheroes and supervillains get made — being poisoned by weird chemicals a megalomaniac dumped in their town.
And The Boring Company is now just driving people to the airport in Vegas on the regular roads, under the regular sky, and not in their tunnel (or solely in their tunnel). This feels like the ultimate concession that the tunnel isn’t a better option than regular streets.
So yes, I get that any reasonable person can look at Las Vegas and know this is going to be a shitshow for Nashville. And any reasonable person ought to realize that the whole thing is a cross between a nightmare and wishful thinking. A reasonable person would be very scared for the people working on our tunnel.
But I’m begging you, Nashville. Let’s not be reasonable. Let’s see what happens. We might get a spectacular disaster. We might get our own Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. At the least, it will be something to look forward to, and we don’t have a lot of that at the moment.
