SAN ANTONIO — Elon Musk’s Boring Co. started up its 900,000-pound machine to begin digging a tunnel connecting parts of the Morgan’s Wonderland campus on San Antonio’s Northeast Side.
The tunnel will link the inclusive theme park with Morgan’s Hotel, and people will move through it in self-driving electric shuttles, according to Gordon Hartman, founder of Morgan’s Wonderland, the nonprofit venue that’s accessible to people with disabilities.
“Most tunnels, almost all tunnels, have never been ultra-accessible in their design,” he said at the groundbreaking this week. “However, Morgan’s Inclusion Tunnel will ensure that all abilities … can get from one side to the other of Morgan’s Inclusion Campus — that’s what this is about.”
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Boring Co. selected the project, along with several others, from nearly 500 entries in a contest it held in March. It’s the company’s first project in San Antonio.
Since then, Hartman has worked with city and county officials, CPS Energy, the Texas Department of Transportation, Northeast Independent School District and private landowners to get permits and approvals. The permitting process took less than six months.
Steve Davis, Boring Co. president, did not think construction would be able to start this year but said he was proven wrong. He said the projects that “come to fruition are the ones that are the most inspiring, the most useful, and led by people who are true leaders and can move fast.”
The tunnel at Morgan’s was an easy yes.
“It is so obvious and apparent how wonderful this project is; how many people will be helped by this project — it is a universal net positive, and we’re ecstatic to do it,” he said.
The giant cylindrical machine known as Prufrock-5 began drilling the tunnel Tuesday. Drilling is expected to take 16 weeks, and the tunnel is scheduled to open late next year.
But San Antonio-area soil, which Davis described as “a little annoying,” could make for slow going.
“It’s the worst of soft soil with the worst of rock combined into one geology,” he said. “So, I will predict that we will struggle for the first week to have high advance rates, but then we’ll get the hang of it and be OK.”
Davis also brought up the hyperloop tunnel from San Antonio to Austin that Musk pitched in September.
“I really hope we are able to build that,” he said. “There’s a million things we would like to build in Texas, but this (the Morgan’s Wonderland tunnel) I would say is the first real useful and inspiring Texas project, and we’re ecstatic that it’s in San Antonio.”
City Manager Erik Walsh said the quick approvals show the city “can move pretty quickly when we need to.”
He said the project would be the first of its kind not only in Texas but the world, in terms of ultra-accessibility.
“It’s going to be new, and it’ll set a standard for not only the Boring Company, but for the world,” he said.
He thanked city inspectors who visited the Bastrop site to learn about the tunnels as part of the permitting process.
“This is going to be a learning experience, and who knows, maybe it’s not the last time we end up permitting a tunnel here in San Antonio,” he said.
After a countdown, Morgan Hartman, Gordon’s daughter and the inspiration for the campus, pressed a button to symbolically start the machine. The crowd watched a livestream from a white tent that had been set up next to the construction site.
The machine actually is operated from a control center in Bastrop.
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