Question of the Day - 11 June 2022

This is a good question that we'll try to answer, although we couldn't find anything about flooding and the Las Vegas Loop online, the Boring Company doesn't respond to media requests, and the word "flood" doesn't appear even once on its website or in its promotional materials.

But we note that Boring is in talks with Fort Lauderdale to construct a transportation tunnel between downtown and the beach; almost exactly a year ago, Boring submitted a proposal, quickly accepted by the city, to build the subterranean transit system it's calling the "Las Olas Loop.”

When it comes to flooding, Las Vegas has nothing on southeast Florida, where the water table at its deepest is around eight feet and can come as close to the surface as three feet, plus the elevation is around six feet and the area floods frequently with or without storms (high tides, for example). In addition, a lot of the real estate is built on reclaimed wetlands, consisting of sand and karst (eroded limestone), which is porous and unstable (where sinkholes come from). 

So how will Boring construct a tunnel loop in the face of such environmental challenges? In a word, money.

Without going into too many details (this isn't, after all, the Ft. Lauderdale Advisor), the company seems to subscribe to the old saying, "You can engineer yourself out of any problem, given enough funding and time." Before any tunneling can begin, extensive research into the geology, soil stratification, and flood threats must be conducted and both waterproofing and water pumping will have to be taken into account. 

Which brings us to the Las Vegas Loop. Since information about Boring's flood-mitigation strategies is inaccessible to us, at least so far, we can only assume that any company that believes it can build a flood-proof tunnel in southeastern Florida must have enough experience and success in waterproofing its tunnels in Las Vegas, which is certainly flood prone, though of a different order than Ft. Lauderdale.