9 ms·

Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes

235 points by eloisius 1y ago

ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Related: Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540585
NedF 1y ago
[flagged]
consumer451 1y ago
There was an amazing YouTube poop format satire video with Musk saying: ~"There are no consequences. Life has no meaning." I can no longer find it. If anyone else can, it might be nice to link here.
- x______________ 1y ago
  Please be safe and healthier in your ways, consuming poop-related anything is not in your best interest.
sharkjacobs 1y ago
[flagged]
- bawolff 1y ago
  The part that shocks me is they were told to stop, pretended to stop, and then restarted again. I was under the impression that usually the system comes down quite hard on people who show that level of intentionality.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  Maybe things find it so easy to get worse because so many people would rather virtue signal being above having an explicit stance than choose one that's unpopular or be accused of being partisan.
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
  This is a valid take, but I also wonder if there’s anything to be gained by chastising those who complain about the musk company. Nobody does a thing about any company being shitty, a company is singled out by the mob for critique in a way that may (?) lead to some kind of consequence, and my thinking is you may as well join in to get something rather than nothing done. The real issue is that public outrage does absolutely nothing most of the time.
- kelnos 1y ago
  If this was one thing in isolation, I'd easily believe that many/most other companies are just as bad, and get slapped with small fines like this that they treat as a cost of doing business (and ends up being cheaper than the cost of doing the right thing in the first place). But it looks like they were, in total, fined for 800 or so environmental violations, which feels like a lot of violations: https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-violations-fines-vegas-loop https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-...
- apical_dendrite 1y ago
  > Do companies run by Elon Musk violate ethical and environmental regulations much more often than other similar companies, or does it just seem that way as a casual news reader because it is more worthwhile for outlets to publish a story when it happens? He's contemptuous of regulators, doesn't care about his or his company's reputation (or at least negative publicity doesn't seem to change his behavior, although he whines when people criticize him), has an extreme tolerance for risk, knows that he has unlimited resources to fight off lawsuits and regulators, has donated vast sums of money to the current president, and at least at Twitter, got rid of all the people who were working on safety issues. So it's not a surprise that there are more ethics violations then at a company where the executives still go by the "don't do anything that would get your name in The New York Times" rule.
- atmavatar 1y ago
  > Do companies run by Elon Musk violate ethical and environmental regulations much more often than other similar companies This strikes me as a completely wrong-headed take on it. It's not OK for one company to do this merely because others do the same or worse. I'd much prefer no companies violate ethical and environmental regulations. I applaud the exposé not because of Elon's political leanings or even because he's involved with the company at all, but because I hope it's at least a little push towards the company behaving better. Should there be other companies requiring similar exposés (and I think we all there are), I look forward to reading them if/when Politico or some other journalist outlet publishes them, regardless of the political affiliations in the offending companies' leadership. I don't quite understand this mentality that it's not OK to investigate or otherwise bring justice to organizations considered right-leaning until it's been exhaustively proven no organization on the left is at least as bad. If you don't want right-leaning companies being the first in the crosshairs, maybe join the team and convince them from the inside that flagrantly violating the law in front of the very inspectors sent to verify legal compliance only to resume doing it the moment they believe said inspectors left but without verifying it is really stupid. If you have a large number of corporations breaking the law, you have to start your investigations somewhere, and the company with the giant neon sign saying "we're breaking the law!" is as good a spot to start as any.
  - sharkjacobs 1y ago
    I made a mistake if my post made it seem like I thought this article should not be written or published. And especially if it seemed like my concern was that I thought Boring Company was being unfairly targeted because of Elon's repellent politics. I'm concerned that this article was published because Elon Musk is a celebrity, not because the offence itself is newsworthy. And if I thought that this article would effect corporate practices anyway, I would simply shut my mouth, and keep my apprehensions to myself. But I suspect that Elon will get a little dopamine hit if he sees his name in a news headline, and every other CEO of a major corporation will ignore it altogether and continue committing environmental offences whenever they think it is advantageous. I think that Elon Musk is a bad person, I think that billionaires shouldn't exist, and specifically that the kinds of people who become billionaires are some of the worst kinds of people to wield power in society. But I don't think that Elon Musk is special. I don't think that he's a uniquely bad person, I think he is basically a very normal CEO. > Should there be other companies requiring similar exposés I think that there are so many other such cases that it is almost impossible to wrap my head around. I said "I wish I had a sense of the numbers" not because I want to normalize and excuse this, but because I think the scope of the problem is so much bigger than this story suggests. Here[1] is a tiny slice of what I mean, a review of environmental penalties issued in Ontario, Canada. It seems like there should be 15 to 20 such exposes in the Local News section of The Toronto Star every year. Elon Musk, like every other antisocial monster leading a major corporation is "just" making a calculated decision comparing the risk of getting caught and the cost of a fine against the expense of doing the right thing. I think the real story is that maybe fines are insufficient to address the issue of corporate environmental offenses, or that maybe they accurately represent the priorities of regulators, but not of citizens. There's a problem here and it's not that Elon Musk is evil. Our society needs to be resilient to the existence of evil people. [1]https://www.ontario.ca/page/2016-2020-environmental-penalties-five-year-review https://www.ontario.ca/page/2016-2020-environmental-penaltie...
AlexandrB 1y ago
The Boring Company seems like a total nothingburger at this point. The Las Vegas Loop is not particularly impressive and it's taking a long time to expand it. Nothing about this feels revolutionary or even evolutionary. Just novelty. The fact that Teslas can't navigate autonomously even in these controlled, enclosed environments is also quite embarrassing.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 1y ago
  What do they do that is more impressive than routine tunnels built in cities for the last few decades (or even between different soverign countries under the sea!)?
  - ggreer 1y ago
    Their main differentiator is cost. The Boring Company bid $48.7 million for the initial LVCC loop. The total cost to complete it was $53 million. The second cheapest bid was Doppelmeyer Cableliner, which would have built a people mover for $215M. The people mover would have had about 50% more capacity per station, but at 4 times the cost. Tunnel cost is mostly dependent on the volume of material removed, which means that cost goes up linearly with length but with the square of the tunnel diameter. Trains and people movers tend to require significantly larger diameter tunnels, so their costs tend to be much higher. Also Boring Company tunnels don't need much infrastructure in them, so they save money on rails, high voltage power systems, rolling stock, etc.
    - Rebelgecko 1y ago
      How do their operating costs compare?
    - bamboozled 1y ago
      they also don't exist.
- wyldfire 1y ago
  It's an outstanding mechanism to derail public transit efforts, that's all. It's not a nothing burger because that would suggest it's a good faith effort that just didn't pan out.
bawolff 1y ago
How is that only a $500,000 fine??? Stopping when inspectors are there only to restart once they leave is willful enough that you wonder why this doesn't go into criminal liability?
- TulliusCicero 1y ago
  It's rare for even blatant misconduct of this kind by a company to result in criminal charges. Which is stupid, obviously. If it's intentional/willful breaking of the law, send them to jail the same way you would for an individual.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- therobots927 1y ago
  Corporations are never held accountable in America
  - latch 1y ago
    Isn't the problem exactly the opposite? A corporation has personhood which shields its executives?
    - therobots927 1y ago
      Fair enough. That’s a more accurate way of putting it. Corporations are shields for the ruling elite to get away with pretty much anything. And in addition to that the corporation can be sued by shareholders if it doesn’t maximize shareholder value by externalizing costs. It’s the kind of policy that would be very popular among cancer cells.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  To be fair it's over 3 times the amount of damage they caused, so that is a pretty big profit margin on cleaning up the mess.
binary132 1y ago
Some of these companies seem to have figured out that you can just do things and get away with it if you don’t mind paying a few fines (maybe “fees” would be a better term??)
- bamboozled 1y ago
  Some? This is basically how we let society work now. If you have money, you can do really abhorrent things and just get away with it with almost zero consequence. We have the law and the police setup to protect the rich from any real rebuttal to this status quo so we're locked in.
  - captainkrtek 1y ago
    Especially if you donate money to politicians in power, extra perks
  - XenophileJKO 1y ago
    I guess my question is when was it ever not this way? Seems way better now than in the past.
    - shakna 1y ago
      It doesn't [0] always work out [1] this way. But it does seem like a consistent theme across civil wars - when the divide between a ruling class and the average is too large, then something violent eventually happens [2]. Lets hope we rebalance before reaching the point where everyone loses, this time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Revolution [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring
      - binary132 1y ago
        The Russian and French Revolutions are hardly examples of “a different way” to be pointed to. I’m a Rerum Novarum appreciator personally.
ProofHouse 1y ago
Honestly this is extra repulsive coming from the richest man in the world
- onetokeoverthe 1y ago
  [dead]
rkagerer 1y ago
Separate from the fines, why doesn't CCWRD litigate to get their cleanup costs back? CCWRD says that its crews ultimately had to clean 12 cubic yards of “drilling mud, drilling spoils, and miscellaneous solid waste” from one of its sewage treatment facilities due to Boring’s discharges across two of its project sites
- zggf 1y ago
  $493,297.08 in fines, including $131,297.08 for the district’s expenses to remedy the fluid dumping
- ryanmcdonough 1y ago
  The clean up costs were referenced in the article and noted that they made up around $130,000 of it.
dangus 1y ago
We need to wise up and make fines based on the net worth of top shareholders and company officers. Elon Musk probably made $800k as I was typing this comment. Maybe a $500k fine is reasonable for a dime a dozen contractor, this fine is a joke.
Animats 1y ago
Just for comparison, here's how real tunneling companies deal with sludge.[1] There's a small portable plant that separates sludge from water. It's about the size of two shipping containers. The water usually gets re-used in the tunneling operation. The Boring Company, on the other hand, has been dumping their wet sludge on a vacant lot near a mall and waiting for the sludge to dry out. The mall doesn't like that. Nor does the city of Las Vegas, now that they found out. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCctmBUHIMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCctmBUHIMo
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
port11 1y ago
Move fast and pollute things: the 3M school of business.
bmitch3020 1y ago
A $500k fine for someone worth $1T is equivalent to a $0.50 fine for someone worth $1M.
hashstring 1y ago
a parking ticket costs more. this is veiled corruption.
Krishan_28 1y ago
$500K fine is nothing for a company that size. If they “feigned compliance,” that’s worse than the spill itself. Rules exist for a reason—follow them or stop digging.

235 points by eloisius 1y ago

Related: Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540585

NedF 1y ago

[flagged]

consumer451 1y ago

There was an amazing YouTube poop format satire video with Musk saying: ~"There are no consequences. Life has no meaning." I can no longer find it. If anyone else can, it might be nice to link here.

x______________ 1y ago
Please be safe and healthier in your ways, consuming poop-related anything is not in your best interest.

sharkjacobs 1y ago

[flagged]

bawolff 1y ago
The part that shocks me is they were told to stop, pretended to stop, and then restarted again. I was under the impression that usually the system comes down quite hard on people who show that level of intentionality.
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
Maybe things find it so easy to get worse because so many people would rather virtue signal being above having an explicit stance than choose one that's unpopular or be accused of being partisan.
BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
This is a valid take, but I also wonder if there’s anything to be gained by chastising those who complain about the musk company. Nobody does a thing about any company being shitty, a company is singled out by the mob for critique in a way that may (?) lead to some kind of consequence, and my thinking is you may as well join in to get something rather than nothing done. The real issue is that public outrage does absolutely nothing most of the time.
kelnos 1y ago
If this was one thing in isolation, I'd easily believe that many/most other companies are just as bad, and get slapped with small fines like this that they treat as a cost of doing business (and ends up being cheaper than the cost of doing the right thing in the first place). But it looks like they were, in total, fined for 800 or so environmental violations, which feels like a lot of violations: https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-violations-fines-vegas-loop https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-...
apical_dendrite 1y ago
> Do companies run by Elon Musk violate ethical and environmental regulations much more often than other similar companies, or does it just seem that way as a casual news reader because it is more worthwhile for outlets to publish a story when it happens? He's contemptuous of regulators, doesn't care about his or his company's reputation (or at least negative publicity doesn't seem to change his behavior, although he whines when people criticize him), has an extreme tolerance for risk, knows that he has unlimited resources to fight off lawsuits and regulators, has donated vast sums of money to the current president, and at least at Twitter, got rid of all the people who were working on safety issues. So it's not a surprise that there are more ethics violations then at a company where the executives still go by the "don't do anything that would get your name in The New York Times" rule.
atmavatar 1y ago
> Do companies run by Elon Musk violate ethical and environmental regulations much more often than other similar companies This strikes me as a completely wrong-headed take on it. It's not OK for one company to do this merely because others do the same or worse. I'd much prefer no companies violate ethical and environmental regulations. I applaud the exposé not because of Elon's political leanings or even because he's involved with the company at all, but because I hope it's at least a little push towards the company behaving better. Should there be other companies requiring similar exposés (and I think we all there are), I look forward to reading them if/when Politico or some other journalist outlet publishes them, regardless of the political affiliations in the offending companies' leadership. I don't quite understand this mentality that it's not OK to investigate or otherwise bring justice to organizations considered right-leaning until it's been exhaustively proven no organization on the left is at least as bad. If you don't want right-leaning companies being the first in the crosshairs, maybe join the team and convince them from the inside that flagrantly violating the law in front of the very inspectors sent to verify legal compliance only to resume doing it the moment they believe said inspectors left but without verifying it is really stupid. If you have a large number of corporations breaking the law, you have to start your investigations somewhere, and the company with the giant neon sign saying "we're breaking the law!" is as good a spot to start as any.
- sharkjacobs 1y ago
  I made a mistake if my post made it seem like I thought this article should not be written or published. And especially if it seemed like my concern was that I thought Boring Company was being unfairly targeted because of Elon's repellent politics. I'm concerned that this article was published because Elon Musk is a celebrity, not because the offence itself is newsworthy. And if I thought that this article would effect corporate practices anyway, I would simply shut my mouth, and keep my apprehensions to myself. But I suspect that Elon will get a little dopamine hit if he sees his name in a news headline, and every other CEO of a major corporation will ignore it altogether and continue committing environmental offences whenever they think it is advantageous. I think that Elon Musk is a bad person, I think that billionaires shouldn't exist, and specifically that the kinds of people who become billionaires are some of the worst kinds of people to wield power in society. But I don't think that Elon Musk is special. I don't think that he's a uniquely bad person, I think he is basically a very normal CEO. > Should there be other companies requiring similar exposés I think that there are so many other such cases that it is almost impossible to wrap my head around. I said "I wish I had a sense of the numbers" not because I want to normalize and excuse this, but because I think the scope of the problem is so much bigger than this story suggests. Here[1] is a tiny slice of what I mean, a review of environmental penalties issued in Ontario, Canada. It seems like there should be 15 to 20 such exposes in the Local News section of The Toronto Star every year. Elon Musk, like every other antisocial monster leading a major corporation is "just" making a calculated decision comparing the risk of getting caught and the cost of a fine against the expense of doing the right thing. I think the real story is that maybe fines are insufficient to address the issue of corporate environmental offenses, or that maybe they accurately represent the priorities of regulators, but not of citizens. There's a problem here and it's not that Elon Musk is evil. Our society needs to be resilient to the existence of evil people. [1]https://www.ontario.ca/page/2016-2020-environmental-penalties-five-year-review https://www.ontario.ca/page/2016-2020-environmental-penaltie...

AlexandrB 1y ago

The Boring Company seems like a total nothingburger at this point. The Las Vegas Loop is not particularly impressive and it's taking a long time to expand it. Nothing about this feels revolutionary or even evolutionary. Just novelty. The fact that Teslas can't navigate autonomously even in these controlled, enclosed environments is also quite embarrassing.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt 1y ago
What do they do that is more impressive than routine tunnels built in cities for the last few decades (or even between different soverign countries under the sea!)?
- ggreer 1y ago
  Their main differentiator is cost. The Boring Company bid $48.7 million for the initial LVCC loop. The total cost to complete it was $53 million. The second cheapest bid was Doppelmeyer Cableliner, which would have built a people mover for $215M. The people mover would have had about 50% more capacity per station, but at 4 times the cost. Tunnel cost is mostly dependent on the volume of material removed, which means that cost goes up linearly with length but with the square of the tunnel diameter. Trains and people movers tend to require significantly larger diameter tunnels, so their costs tend to be much higher. Also Boring Company tunnels don't need much infrastructure in them, so they save money on rails, high voltage power systems, rolling stock, etc.
  - Rebelgecko 1y ago
    How do their operating costs compare?
  - bamboozled 1y ago
    they also don't exist.
wyldfire 1y ago
It's an outstanding mechanism to derail public transit efforts, that's all. It's not a nothing burger because that would suggest it's a good faith effort that just didn't pan out.

bawolff 1y ago

How is that only a $500,000 fine??? Stopping when inspectors are there only to restart once they leave is willful enough that you wonder why this doesn't go into criminal liability?

TulliusCicero 1y ago
It's rare for even blatant misconduct of this kind by a company to result in criminal charges. Which is stupid, obviously. If it's intentional/willful breaking of the law, send them to jail the same way you would for an individual.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
therobots927 1y ago
Corporations are never held accountable in America
- latch 1y ago
  Isn't the problem exactly the opposite? A corporation has personhood which shields its executives?
  - therobots927 1y ago
    Fair enough. That’s a more accurate way of putting it. Corporations are shields for the ruling elite to get away with pretty much anything. And in addition to that the corporation can be sued by shareholders if it doesn’t maximize shareholder value by externalizing costs. It’s the kind of policy that would be very popular among cancer cells.
charcircuit 1y ago
To be fair it's over 3 times the amount of damage they caused, so that is a pretty big profit margin on cleaning up the mess.

binary132 1y ago

Some of these companies seem to have figured out that you can just do things and get away with it if you don’t mind paying a few fines (maybe “fees” would be a better term??)

bamboozled 1y ago
Some? This is basically how we let society work now. If you have money, you can do really abhorrent things and just get away with it with almost zero consequence. We have the law and the police setup to protect the rich from any real rebuttal to this status quo so we're locked in.
- captainkrtek 1y ago
  Especially if you donate money to politicians in power, extra perks
- XenophileJKO 1y ago
  I guess my question is when was it ever not this way? Seems way better now than in the past.
  - shakna 1y ago
    It doesn't [0] always work out [1] this way. But it does seem like a consistent theme across civil wars - when the divide between a ruling class and the average is too large, then something violent eventually happens [2]. Lets hope we rebalance before reaching the point where everyone loses, this time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Revolution [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring
    - binary132 1y ago
      The Russian and French Revolutions are hardly examples of “a different way” to be pointed to. I’m a Rerum Novarum appreciator personally.

ProofHouse 1y ago

Honestly this is extra repulsive coming from the richest man in the world

onetokeoverthe 1y ago
[dead]

rkagerer 1y ago

Separate from the fines, why doesn't CCWRD litigate to get their cleanup costs back? CCWRD says that its crews ultimately had to clean 12 cubic yards of “drilling mud, drilling spoils, and miscellaneous solid waste” from one of its sewage treatment facilities due to Boring’s discharges across two of its project sites

zggf 1y ago
$493,297.08 in fines, including $131,297.08 for the district’s expenses to remedy the fluid dumping
ryanmcdonough 1y ago
The clean up costs were referenced in the article and noted that they made up around $130,000 of it.

dangus 1y ago

We need to wise up and make fines based on the net worth of top shareholders and company officers. Elon Musk probably made $800k as I was typing this comment. Maybe a $500k fine is reasonable for a dime a dozen contractor, this fine is a joke.

Animats 1y ago

Just for comparison, here's how real tunneling companies deal with sludge.[1] There's a small portable plant that separates sludge from water. It's about the size of two shipping containers. The water usually gets re-used in the tunneling operation. The Boring Company, on the other hand, has been dumping their wet sludge on a vacant lot near a mall and waiting for the sludge to dry out. The mall doesn't like that. Nor does the city of Las Vegas, now that they found out. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCctmBUHIMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCctmBUHIMo

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

port11 1y ago

Move fast and pollute things: the 3M school of business.

bmitch3020 1y ago

A $500k fine for someone worth $1T is equivalent to a $0.50 fine for someone worth $1M.

hashstring 1y ago

a parking ticket costs more. this is veiled corruption.

Krishan_28 1y ago

$500K fine is nothing for a company that size. If they “feigned compliance,” that’s worse than the spill itself. Rules exist for a reason—follow them or stop digging.