- Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tunneling business was fined $500k by regulators.
- The Boring Company accused of dumping drilling fluids into manholes.
- Officials removed 12 cubic yards of waste left behind by the company.
Elon Musk is in the news again over massive dollar payments, but this time it’s got nothing to do with the tech mogul’s $1 trillion Tesla deal.
No, this time it’s the fault of one of his other businesses, The Boring Company, which has been slapped with a steep fine after officials in Las Vegas found that drilling fluids from one of its projects were ending up in city drains.
Related: Yale Economists Quantify Exactly How Many Sales Musk’s Politics Cost Tesla
Environmental regulators dished out a $493,297 fine for a breach that caused “substantial damage” to the county’s infrastructure, Fortune reports.
The total included a $131,297 fee for a cleanup operation that required the removal of 12 cubic yards of “drilling mud, drilling spoils, and miscellaneous solid waste.”
The Clark County Water Reclamation District (CCWRD), which has only ever handed out a single fine of more than $100,000 for an illegal wastewater discharge in the last three years, said the size of the almost $500k penalty was a result of “the egregious nature of the violations,” the damage caused and The Boring Company’s acknowledgment of its responsibility.
Caught in the Act
But it wasn’t simply the dumping of potentially toxic fluids from the drilling process that got the regulators so worked up; it was the deceit.
Responding to an anonymous tip received in August, the CCWRD visited The Boring Company’s site in Las Vegas, discovered the ecological infringement and ordered workers to stop the discharge, but they refused.
When officials returned the next day, The Boring Company’s engineers did remove connections that allowed the fluids to be dumped, but they hooked them back up when they believed the inspectors had left the site.
Past Issues Below Ground
The Boring Company was founded in 2017 as a subsidiary of another Elon Musk company, SpaceX, but later became a corporate entity in its own right.
Despite having plans to create subterranean transit systems in multiple cities around the world, including Dubai, the only successfully operating, publicly-rideable system is in Las Vegas.
It has been in trouble before both for violating environmental regulations and exposing the foundations of two pillars supporting Las Vegas’s elevated monorail, Fortune reports.
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