Musk’s Boring Company Wants to Dump Wastewater in Texas River, Worrying Local Residents

Residents of a Texas city outside of Austin are concerned about Elon Musk’s plans for their river water. 

Musk’s The Boring Company works to quickly dig tunnels for freight, utility and transportation in the hopes of relieving urban congestion. In the process, it’s seeking a permit to release more than 140,000 gallons of treated wastewater into a river near its Bastrop, Texas, facility every day.

“This wastewater permit is a big deal,” Bastrop resident Chap Ambrose, who also lives across the street from the company’s chief construction site, said at a public hearing on the permit request Tuesday, as HuffPost reported. “I just don’t trust this company to build public infrastructure based on what I see.”

The Boring Company first set up shop in Bastrop two years ago. Since then, Ambrose’s empty block has transformed into a 24-hour construction site. 

“It’s definitely a radical change,” Ambrose told KVUE.

In those same two years, the company has also already violated several regulations, as Bloomberg reported in June of 2022. It housed employees in mobile homes without sewage facilities, installed three silos without air quality or stormwater permits and built a driveway without approval then pushed back on safety requests to add space for vehicles to access the road.

“[It’s] extremely unusual, especially for a major company like that, to basically ignore state safety laws,” Austin-based transportation consultant Lyndon Henry told Bloomberg. “I would think it reflects very badly on them to be ignoring safety regulations regarding something as simple and elementary as an access driveway.”

Which is why many residents were skeptical when Boring affiliate Gapped Bass LLC applied for a permit in July of 2022 to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to pour as many as 142,500 gallons of treated wastewater into the Colorado River each day, as KXAN reported in October of 2022. (The Colorado River in Texas is different from the imperiled river that passes through the U.S. West.)

Concerned citizens were quick to comment.

“The Boring Company should NOT be able to dump treated wastewater into the Colorado River in Bastrop, Texas. The community uses that river for recreation, farmers and ranchers use that water to feed us. This should not be allowed,” Bastrop resident Kelly Greene wrote in a comment to TCEQ. 

While TCEQ’s initial assessment concluded that the discharges would harm water quality, Bastrop Mayor Connie Schroder told KVUE she isn’t sold on the idea.

“The City of Bastrop, like all municipalities, would prefer wastewater to be treated at state-of-the-art treatment plants and it just so happens the City of Bastrop has one under construction,” Schroder said.

Dozens of residents voiced worries at a public TCEQ hearing Tuesday night. One resident, Sean Hensley, told HuffPost he wanted TCEQ to reject the permit “unless Elon Musk and his kids are going to come swim in the Colorado River every day.”

Not everyone at the hearing was against the idea. 

“Where there’s people, there’s going to be wastewater,” Bastrop County Water Control and Improvement District Treasurer Ron Whipple said, as HuffPost reported. “We can’t stop progress.”

The company was represented at the hearing by environmental consultant Rajiv Patel, who filed the permit. He said it was a short-term solution because there was no wastewater infrastructure at the company site, so they needed to build their own facility until they could access the public system and place the treatment plant under the control of the local government.

“The plan we’re going to be talking about today is a step on the road map,” Patel said. 

However, he also sparked some concern by mentioning for the first time that some of the water would come from a different SpaceX site.

Several residents mentioned that they were friendly to Musk and business on principle, but wanted to make sure everyone in their community respected the same rules.

“I think really I’m excited about our community coming together and say[ing] ‘billionaires have to follow the law,’” Ambrose told KVUE ahead of the hearing.