Elon Musk\u2019s Boring Company came under fire Tuesday during a more than three-hour Nevada legislative hearing about the Elon Musk\u2013owned tunneling startup\u2019s safety and environmental track record as it tries to dig an underground transit system below Las Vegas.<\/p>\n
State legislators on Nevada\u2019s growth and infrastructure interim standing committee presented a lengthy list of violations that Boring has racked up since 2019\u2014including citations over chemical burns; digging too close to the Las Vegas monorail; hundreds of environmental violations; wastewater dumping into county manholes; and accidents and mishaps that have happened during construction. They also peppered state regulators with questions about the adequacy of their oversight of Boring and asked how the legislature could help them better monitor the company in the future.<\/p>\n
Some of the safety issues discussed at the hearing\u2014including that two firefighters were burned by chemicals during a training drill and that an enormous concrete bin had collapsed in front of the Las Vegas Convention Center\u2014as well as issues with oversight, were first disclosed to the public in stories by Fortune.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m concerned that breaking the law and breaking the rules has essentially just become a cost of doing business for companies in Musk\u2019s orbit,\u201d committee chair Howard Watts, a Democrat, said as he convened the meeting. Watts noted that Boring Company had fought every violation that had been levied against the company since 2019.<\/p>\n
The committee had slated time on the agenda for Boring Company representatives to testify and answer questions, but no representative from the startup showed up to the hearing. Boring sent a notice to the committee on Sunday evening, saying that it would be \u201cunable to attend\u201d and offering a seven-page response to a request for information that the committee had sent in advance. The response described the startup\u2019s safety team, referred the committee to materials Nevada OSHA had published, and shared \u201chighlights\u201d of the safety of its system.<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s absence drew heavy criticism from two Democratic members of the committee, who referred to the company as a \u201cknown bad actor\u201d and a \u201crepeat violator.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m incredibly disappointed that a company valued at $7 billion that has a team of government affairs and lobbyists were unable to make the time today for us to ask those questions\u2014to make sure that our communities are protected from environmental disasters,\u201d Democratic State Sen. Rochelle Nguyen said.<\/p>\n
Chair Watts said that Boring Company\u2019s written response \u201cbarely addressed the information that we requested from them.\u201d<\/p>\n
While Boring Company did not attend the hearing, representatives from Nevada\u2019s Division of Industrial Relations and Department of Business and Industry testified, as did representatives from the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection (NDEP). The agencies answered detailed questions about inspections and enforcement efforts aimed at the Boring Company over the past several years and defended their regulatory approach. Nevada\u2019s safety regulators acknowledged the agency did not follow its best practices during an inspection into the firefighter burns and said it had implemented new policies and procedures.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a very unique project,\u201d said Jennifer Carr, administrator of NDEP. \u201cIt is moving fast. It has expanded into a number of areas of town. Most of our permits are static facilities, and so we are also challenged with just the nature of the project. But my staff have stepped up admirably to ensure that we are looking at what\u2019s important along the way.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Governor\u2019s Office, which Fortune reported had been looped in by the Boring Company when the company was cited after firefighters were injured in its tunnels, declined to send a representative to the hearing in a letter.<\/p>\n
Members of the committee stated that they hoped to get information out to the public about recent high-profile incidents and make sure that state agencies were positioned to regulate the Boring Company adequately to prevent future violations.<\/p>\n
\u201cI see this hearing today not just about innovation versus regulation, but about whether our systems of review for enforcement and accountability are functioning as intended, whether or not they are strong enough to protect workers, first responders, and the public when the stakes are high like they are in this circumstance,\u201d Senator Nguyen said. She added: \u201cWe don\u2019t want to wait until it\u2019s beyond chemical burns or our community\u2019s water is poisoned. We want to make sure that we can do what we can now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Source: RhinoEasy News<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Elon Musk\u2019s Boring Company came under fire Tuesday during a more than three-hour Nevada legislative hearing about the Elon Musk\u2013owned<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":823,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}