The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s tunnel company, has selected New Orleans as a potential site for a one-mile underground loop.
The “NOLA Loop” is one of three winners of the company’s Tunnel Vision Challenge, company officials announced Tuesday. The other winners are Baltimore and Dallas.
Boring Company officials pledged to pay the costs of a “rigorous diligence process” and to “fund/build” the New Orleans tunnel — if it’s determined to be feasible.
Mayor Helena Moreno cited the project as an example of a new excitement among those considering investments in New Orleans.
“Any time major corporations or players are interested in New Orleans, it’s a positive,” Moreno said in a statement. “We are in the early stages of exploring this project.”
It is not clear where the tunnel would be built or what purpose it would serve. So far, the only Boring Company-built tunnels in public use are used to move Teslas around near the Las Vegas Strip.
Also unclear is how the project would overcome the geographic limitations of New Orleans, which has a historically high water table and sits on soil deposited from the Mississippi River.
No details about the plan were available from the Moreno administration, and representatives of The Boring Company have not responded to questions regarding who submitted the proposal, where it would be built and whether company officials contacted any state or local authorities about it.
Tunnel visions
There were nearly 500 entries to the challenge, which allowed individuals, businesses or governments to propose tunnels and provide their benefit and rationale.
Submissions were judged based on their usefulness, their level of “stakeholder engagement” and their technical, economic and regulatory feasibility, according to the company.
“Whether it is feasible or not, we’ve opened the door for conversations that could lead to opportunities, even if it’s not this one,” Moreno said.
Now that New Orleans has been selected, the next steps in the process include meetings between The Boring Company and “elected officials, regulators, community leaders and business leaders,” as well as “geotechnical borings” and “utility and subsurface infra[structure] investigation,” according to an announcement from The Boring Company.
Headquartered in Hawthorne, California, The Boring Company was spun out of SpaceX in 2018 with the promise of high-speed, low-cost tunnels for transportation and utilities.
Musk initially announced plans to build “hyperloop” tunnels to allow travel at more than 600 mph using magnetic levitation and vacuum tubes. Those plans have been largely abandoned in favor of putting regular Tesla cars in standard-pressure tunnels.
So far, the company has dug more than 10 miles of tunnels in Las Vegas, about 4 miles of which are currently operational. The company eventually hopes to have a 68-mile underground network in Las Vegas capable of moving 90,000 passengers around in Tesla vehicles every hour.
Construction is also underway in Nashville, where the privately funded Music City Loop promises to reduce the time it takes to get from downtown to the airport to about 8 minutes.
Last month, state and federal transportation officials approved a lease and permit for The Boring Company to move forward with construction on state-owned land in Tennessee.
“The Music City Loop shows what’s possible when we leverage private-sector innovation and American ingenuity to solve transportation challenges,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a release announcing the approval.
New Orleans’ historically high water table and deltaic soil deposited relatively recently by the Mississippi River have made tunnels in the area extremely rare.
“For years the people of the Deep South shrugged off the thought of having tunnels because they were sure you couldn’t build anything through the muck that is Louisiana’s channel beds,” Times-Picayune reporters wrote in 1958 following the completion of the Harvey Tunnel.
“There’s an adage among engineers that, ‘If you have a choice between building a tunnel or a bridge, build a bridge,'” Tulane University historian and geographer Richard Campanella said Tuesday in a phone interview.
Though the project is technically possible, Campanella said there’s a good reason there are only a few functional tunnels in the region.
“It is a challenge here, you’re not dealing with hard earth, you’re dealing with recently deposited sand silt, clay water and organic matter,” Campanella said.
Construction and repair is underway inside the Canal Street tunnel after a section of the street collapsed recently. Lt. Col. Mark Jernigan gives an update on the ongoing repairs to the tunnel, Friday, May 13, 2016. (Photo by Ted Jackson, Nola.com | The Times-Picayune)
Historically, abandoned tunnels have left behind buckled pavement on the tarmac at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport and on Canal Street above a 700-foot tunnel (resulting in a sinkhole named “Sinky” that emerged in 2016) built for the abortive Riverfront Expressway.
“The thing was canceled, and the city was stuck with this useless tunnel, now used as valet parking for the casino,” he said, noting that the logistics of the NOLA Loop project will depend on where it is located.
A spokesperson for Moreno’s office has not said whether any city officials were involved in preparing the submission for The Boring Company’s Tunnel Vision competition.
