Just hours after Nevada's workplace safety agency issued over $400,000 in fines to Elon Musk's $5.6 billion tunneling venture, the Boring Company, an employee at Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo's office received a phone call on May 28.
TL;DR
- The Boring Company faced significant safety fines, which were later revoked after intervention from Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo's office.
- Records of the meeting between Boring Company and state officials were erased from public view without explanation.
- Concerns have arisen within Nevada OSHA regarding potential influence by a major business on regulatory processes.
- Further safety incidents have occurred at Boring Company sites, with employees expressing fear of retaliation for reporting issues.
Steve Davis, president of Boring Co., was speaking. Boring Company was contesting citations from Nevada's workplace safety agency, which held it responsible for chemical burns sustained by two firefighters in its tunnels during a training drill.
By the following afternoon, several top state officials, including the governor's state infrastructure coordinator who received the call, met with Davis. Davis was concluding his time in Washington D.C., where he assisted Musk in managing the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). At the outset of this meeting, the penalties and fines—which were among the agency's most significant in ten years and could jeopardize Boring's ambitions to construct tunnels in additional U.S. Cities—were promptly revoked.
Shortly thereafter, another item vanished: The account of the Governor's office's discussion with Musk's firm was deleted from a public record without any stated reason. Further anomalies surfaced in the case documentation: Papers were not added to the file, and a document meant to justify the cancellation of the citations was omitted.
According to an OSHA staffer and someone involved in the case, the sequence of developments, first revealed by Coins2Day, has caused concern and a chilling impact within Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration. This situation prompts questions regarding the extent to which a significant business can influence regulatory frameworks and evade appropriate supervision, particularly as Musk's group of companies becomes more deeply connected to Nevada's economy.
“There is a defined process, and we didn’t follow it,” says one of the people that worked on the case file. “It wasn’t the agency that decided to do that—it was above the agency,” the person added, speaking on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation from speaking about internal OSHA matters.
In statements to Coins2Day, Teri Williams, a spokeswoman for Nevada OSHA and the state departments that sit above it, described most of the irregularities in public record documentation of the case as innocuous mistakes, and said the agency had amended its case file after Coins2Day’s outreach “to ensure that the file is accurate.” She said the citations and fines did not meet legal requirements and should never have been issued in the first place, and that, as a result of this incident, the agency has since updated its policies and procedures to provide more oversight of OSHA investigations into “high-profile” employers.
Williams stated concerning the meeting that the Governor’s office “frequently receives complaints and inquiries” employers and that “it is standard practice” for The Governor’s office to contact leadership to help with issues and questions. She mentioned that the Governor’s office has not ever instructed Nevada agencies to settle complaints and that, in this situation, it would have backed an agency’s choice to retain citations if they were “found to have merit and could be validated.”.
“This specific outreach from Boring Company is not an anomaly and only stands out due to the high-profile nature of the business because of its affiliation with Elon Musk,” she said. (To read Nevada’s OSHA entire response to this story, click here.)
Four lawyers and former Nevada regulators, however, say this level of political involvement in an OSHA investigation is not only highly unusual, but goes against procedure. “It’s absolutely not appropriate,” said Jess Lankford, who oversaw Nevada OSHA until 2021. The agency is supposed to have the political independence to call “balls and strikes” as it sees fit, says Terry Johnson, an adjunct professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who previously served as the director of the department that sits above OSHA.
“It’s absolutely not appropriate.”Jess Lankford, Chief Administrative Officer of Nevada OSHA until 2021
Elon Musk's investments in Nevada include The Boring Company's plan for a 104-station underground tunnel system linking the Convention Center, the Las Vegas Strip, and Allegiant Stadium. This project is among significant ventures like the $7 billion Tesla Gigafactory, which has created over 17,000 jobs for construction and factory personnel and attracted other businesses to the vicinity.
While the repercussions of the concluded inquiry have been unfolding discreetly, additional safety mishaps have transpired at Boring project locations in Las Vegas, within what a former employee characterized as a “cowboy” environment concerning safety measures. In September, a worker sustained a pelvic injury crushed; earlier this summer, another staff member received an electrical shock from a panel; and the caustic substances that caused burns to firefighters, part of a hazardous sludge found in the tunnels, continue to pose a constant risk to Boring employees, as reported by five current and former Boring Company staff members who requested anonymity due to concerns about retaliation.
A former employee recounted how staff frequently knelt in the mire, only becoming aware of burns as they occurred. “They go to peel off their sock,” they stated, “And a big old chunk of skin comes off.”
Concurrently, a present Nevada OSHA staff member states that the OSHA personnel engaged in the agency's active inquiries concerning Boring (one of which pertains to the injured worker) are apprehensive that they will “get disciplined for doing their job.”
“It’s very political right now,” they added.
The narrative concerning firefighter injuries within Boring Co. Tunnels, the Governor’s office's participation, and the canceled penalties stems from discussions with Nevada regulators and past or present Nevada OSHA staff, conversations with current and former Boring Co. Workers, legal assessments from Nevada-based attorneys, and a substantial volume of documentation. This documentation includes calendars, emails, images, and memos pertaining to OSHA's investigation, some of which were acquired through multiple Freedom of Information Act requests and others shared confidentially with Coins2Day.
Boring Company and Davis did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
A fire drill gone awry
The Boring Company, founded by Musk, presents itself as an innovative transportation solution, aiming to construct an extensive tunnel network, designated as “underground highway”, enabling Teslas to travel rapidly beneath the urban landscapes of Las Vegas, Nashville, and subsequently, other metropolitan areas.
The company has secured over $900 million in investments throughout its history, as reported by PitchBook, drawing capital from Prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firms like Sequoia Capital. Currently, Boring's sole operational demonstration of its concept is a brief 4-mile tunnel beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center, connecting to two casinos. However, Boring Co. President Davis, a seasoned associate of Musk's enterprises, is actively working to extend the Las Vegas “Loop” tunnel system throughout the city and other parts of the wider county.
Building the underground Tesla system is grueling work in the best of cases—involving giant drilling machines, toxic chemicals, and long shifts. At Boring Co. Safety precautions and environmental permits have seemingly been thrown to the side in favor of speed. A Coins2Day investigation published in early 2024 found that numerous employees had suffered from burns caused by an accelerant used to harden the concrete mixture that keeps the tunnel structure in place. That chemical, called MasterRoc AGA 41S, mixes with groundwater and dirt as the tunneling proceeds, and pools at the base of the tunnels, sometimes to knee-high levels.
So when the Clark County fire department began to familiarize itself with the tunnel network to conduct emergency rescue drills at the end of 2024, the question of how to deal with the muck was part of the planning process, according to planning documents reviewed by Coins2Day. Boring was slated to brief firefighters on the muck fluid before each day of the December safety drills.
Preparation for the two-day fire drill began more than a month beforehand. Scripts about the hypothetical accident and evacuation were put together, five prep meetings were held, and the Fire Department stowed an approximately 200-pound mannequin dummy in a hard-to-reach location within the tunnel, so the technical rescue team could simulate an arduous evacuation, according to planning materials, documents Boring Company shared with OSHA, and the Fire Department’s subsequent review of the drills that were shared with Coins2Day.
Around thirteen fire departments showed up for the exercise on December 9, positioning their vehicles near the training area and at the Centerfolds strip club located nearby.
The first day went as planned, but it was right after the drill on the second day, December 10, 2024, that complications ensued. After two hours in the tunnels, two firefighters reported irritation on their legs. They were taken to the hospital, where it was determined that their legs had been burned by the chemicals in Boring’s tunnel. The firefighters’ skin was permanently scarred, according to findings from the subsequent OSHA investigation, though they left the hospital later that same day and were back at work the next work shift, which was two days later, a spokeswoman for the County Fire Department says.
OSHA’s investigator interviewed four firefighters who were at the drill, according to notes from the interviews obtained by Coins2Day in a records request (the names of the firefighters were redacted). Three of the firefighters said that the muck fluid reached the top of their boots or above, and one of the firefighters who was burned said they had to crawl through it at one point to rescue the dummy, according to the notes. “My boots were full of muck,” they said.
Some of the firefighters appeared not to have been aware of the risk, the notes show. “We weren’t aware of the chemicals being hazardous,” one firefighter said, according to the notes, pointing out that Boring Company had supposedly told them “we could just wash it off after” and that it was “just mud.” Another firefighter reported that the Boring Company “had someone put their full arm in the muck” and tell them “they’d be fine.”
According to one former Boring employee who worked at the company at the time of the drills, workers had made an effort to clear the tunnels of the muck fluid before the fire department arrived for the exercise. “There’s no way to fully clean it,” the employee said, “Because there’s constant flow coming out of the machine, even when it’s standing still.”
“We’re so used to dealing with it on a daily basis,” they added.
Shortly after Nevada’s OSHA opened an investigation, Boring Company’s lawyers put together a response in which Boring denied any responsibility and placed full blame for the incident on the Clark County Fire Department. “The key breakdowns in the Training Plan were committed by CCFD employees, not TBC employees,” the company’s lawyer wrote in the letter. (The Fire Department maintains that “CCFD followed all recommendations from TBC” and says that OSHA found no fault with the Fire Department for the incident) In the response, Boring Company provided nearly 1,000 pages of documents that OSHA had requested, including receipts of equipment and protective gear it had purchased as well as documentation showing it had debriefed the Fire Department on the chemicals, performed safety meetings prior to the drills, and offered the use of a liner truck to transport the firefighters through the tunnel.
Nevada OSHA came to a different conclusion. On May 28, OSHA issued three “willful” citations against Boring. These are the most aggressive violations the agency can levy, reserved for an employer that committed an “intentional and knowing” violation or knew that a hazardous condition existed and made no “reasonable effort” to eliminate it. All three citations were categorized as “serious,” meaning there was a “substantial probability that death or serious physical harm” could have occurred.
“We’re so used to dealing with it on a daily basis.”Former Boring Company employee
OSHA proposed penalties of $425,595 for the three citations, according to the citation notice sent to Boring Company. That may not sound like much for a company owned by the world’s richest man, but it would have been the third-largest initial penalty Nevada OSHA had issued to an employer since 2015, according to a public database of enforcement actions that the Department of Labor keeps on its website. The median initial penalty Nevada OSHA issued in the first six months of this year was $5,142, according to OSHA.
A fine of that size could also have been a public black eye for the company at a time when it was pushing to expand in Las Vegas and win business in other cities.
‘Not the way it’s supposed to work’
When Boring Co.’s Davis called the Governor’s office the day the company received the citations, he spoke to Chris Reilly, the governor’s point person for state infrastructure, who was hired in 2024 after working at Tesla for more than seven years.
The next day, May 29, at 4 p.m. A coterie of high-level Nevada officials gathered to meet with a handful of Boring executives, including Davis and Tyler Fairbanks, head of project development at Boring Co., according to a copy of the meeting invite, calendar records, and independent verification by Coins2Day. The Nevada government attendees included Reilly; Dr. Kristopher Sanchez, the Governor Lombardo-appointed director of the Department of Business and Industry (DBI); as well as supervisory staff from the Division of Industry Relations (DIR), which oversees Nevada OSHA; Nevada OSHA itself, and a representative from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. (Governor Lombardo himself was not present, and was reviewing legislation at the time, according to a copy of his calendar that Coins2Day received in a records request.)
Boring Co. Had prepared a 25-page slide deck for the meeting that echoed its previous arguments and called the citations “patently absurd” and “demonstrably false.” Before the company laid out its case in the meeting, however, Nevada OSHA had already withdrawn the citations, and state officials kicked off the meeting by telling Boring Co. They had been rescinded, Nevada’s OSHA confirmed in a statement to Coins2Day. “No information provided during the meeting was the basis for the citations being withdrawn,” OSHA’s Williams said in an email.
In an interview, Victoria Carreón, the Administrator of the Division of Industrial Relations, which oversees Nevada OSHA, who was also in the meeting, said that the concerns Boring raised to the Governor’s office had led Nevada OSHA’s legal counsel to go back and review the citations ahead of the meeting.
The state’s lawyers determined the key elements for a citation were not met and so “we decided that the best course of action was to withdraw the citation pending further review,” she said, noting that the subsequent review found that the “particular citations that were originally composed were not warranted to be reissued.”
Reilly, the state infrastructure coordinator in Lombardo’s office, added in a statement that, in the May 29 meeting, representatives from OSHA and the Division of Industrial Relations had shared that the violations were issued without proper internal documentation, failed to consider materials previously submitted by the company refuting the violations, and “should not have been sent.”
“We decided that the best course of action was to withdraw the citation pending further review.”Victoria Carreón, Administrator of the Division of Industrial Relations
Nevada OSHA’s official procedures provide a mechanism for companies to contest citations by submitting a written objection and arranging an informal meeting with OSHA to request penalty adjustments or complete withdrawal. However, once the governor's office became involved, none of these steps were taken.
According to several sources, including past and present Nevada OSHA staff, officials, and labor attorneys, it's improper for The Governor's office and politically appointed individuals to interfere with a particular OSHA inspection, even when a prominent company is involved, Coins2Day stated. Jess Lankford, who previously served as Nevada OSHA's chief administrative officer, commented that the Governor's office's involvement is “not the way it’s supposed to work.”
Discrepancies in official documentation and preferential treatment for substantial businesses
Several of the things that happened next were, even by OSHA’s admission, inconsistent with the agency’s standard process and norms. After the May 29 meeting, the three now-rescinded citations against Boring Co. Were never mentioned again in the OSHA case file, even though documentation of their removal should have appeared in the public record, according to Coins2Day’s review of the case file. No document was added to the file explaining or justifying their removal. “There are various missing documents, processes that weren’t followed. So we know that the policies, the procedures, were not being followed,” Nevada OSHA’s Williams acknowledged on a call with Coins2Day.
Furthermore, a crucial document within OSHA’s Boring Company inspection records was modified, as confirmed by two individuals familiar with the situation and documentation reviewed by Coins2Day. The people stated that a line in the OSHA case diary, which was the sole mention of a meeting with The Governor’s office in the file, was removed. Coins2Day conducted a comparison between the publicly accessible record obtained from OSHA and a prior version acquired from sources that had been accessible to all agency personnel on their server, verifying that the entry detailing the meeting had been erased from the case diary.
“You have substantial evidence that shows there was, I’m not going to use the word illegal, but there was some questionable practices right there, having that removed,” said Lankford, the former OSHA chief administrative officer.
Ron Zambrano, who chairs employment litigation at West Coast Trial Lawyers, representing clients on the plaintiff side in California and Nevada, stated, "“From an attorney’s standpoint, it looks really bad,”." He further commented, "“You did something very unusual with this embarrassing thing, which is try to hide it,”."
The case file also contained additional inconsistencies, such as an erroneous date on a crucial document, absent worksheets explaining the reasoning for the citations Nevada OSHA deemed “apparently not saved into the file”, and a further document that was “inadvertently omitted.”.
Concerning the removal of the Governor's office meeting from the record, authorities acknowledged the deletion of the entry but stressed that no superiors had ordered its removal.
Reilly, representing Governor Lombardo’s office, stated that “no record was edited at the direction of me, the Governor’s Office, DIR, B&I, or any other entity I am aware of,” and added that the “insinuation” indicating these officers had authorized such a removal was “incorrect.”. Nevada OSHA spokesperson Williams also refuted claims that Nevada departments attempted to hide the meeting, asserting they were transparent about it to Coins2Day.
Following Coins2Day’s questions, Nevada OSHA revised the case file and provided a fresh case diary. This updated diary now includes information at the end detailing a May 29 “collaborative meeting w/ employer” where Boring Company was informed “OSHA was withdrawing the citation.”. Notably, the case diary no longer states that officials from The Governor’s office attended. (For Nevada’s OSHA’s complete response to comments on this story, see here.)
Concurrently, the state has updated its OSHA regulations, potentially leading to a more protracted or challenging process for levying penalties against substantial businesses such as the Boring Co. Carreón, the DIR Administrator, stated that her department initiated a “quality review process” following the Boring case, subsequently introducing revised policies and procedures. These include a mandatory 30-day legal review phase and informing the Public Information Officer in cases of “high-profile” or “large-scale employer”. Carreón indicated that the objective is to enhance the caliber of Nevada OSHA case documentation and ensure its “legally sufficient.”.
Williams emphasized that OSHA staff have been guaranteed they possess “full support” from DBI and DIR “to do their job in [a] way that ensures Nevada employees have access to a safe, healthful workplace, and businesses have confidence that the agency will regulate them in a fair and impartial manner.”
Boring ended up making a few concessions with OSHA, which included monthly “update” meetings with the chief administrative officer (CAO) of Nevada OSHA. But the CAO, William Gardner, who held that role when the original citations were issued against Boring, left in July, and Carreón acknowledged that the meetings have not been taking place monthly.
‘They won’t make sh*t safe for us’
Construction on the underground highway network beneath Las Vegas is ongoing. According to three current and former Boring Co. Employees who have worked for the company this year, the push to accelerate the project has intensified since June. This acceleration began after Steve Davis resumed his daily duties at the company, following his temporary involvement in assisting Musk with DOGE. During that month, shortly after citations were issued and subsequently withdrawn, employees observed Davis's increased presence. Three individuals who were employed at Boring in June reported witnessing Davis being transported to and from different project locations, accompanied by an armed security detail in a Cadillac Escalade.
Multiple current and former Boring employees have informed Coins2Day that the same safety concerns continue to exist. Two of them stated that chemical burns appear to occur “daily.” When questioned about safety procedures and instruction, a recently departed employee offered a straightforward response: “There is none.”
“PPE has been provided to the Boring Company workers as well as the firefighters. Accelerant is an integral part of the process and will continue to be used. The Boring Company is working to limit workers’ exposure and is making progress, but properly used PPE remains the correct way for employees to protect themselves,” says a spokeswoman from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the government marketing agency that pays Boring Company to operate the tunnel system below the Convention Center and has overseen the initial project construction.
Meanwhile, within Nevada's agency overseeing workplace safety, the peculiar overturning of the citations is causing widespread consequences. Two employees expressed concern regarding how the incident was managed and how swiftly the citations were rescinded, stating these developments have instilled a fear in agency personnel about inspecting or overseeing Boring Co. Down the road, especially considering two staff members who were involved with The Boring Company. Following the investigation, some employees were demoted or received written reprimands (Williams stated Nevada OSHA declined to comment on “specific personnel actions taken in this case or any other.”). A team member involved in the case expressed concern, shared by many colleagues, that the agency's capacity for impartial enforcement of safety standards and holding employers accountable had been undermined to satisfy one of Nevada's (and globally) most prominent business figures.
“It’s very political right now.”Current OSHA employee
The events may even have emboldened Boring Company in its interactions with regulators. In mid-August, Clark County’s environmental regulators allege, Boring workers refused to stop dumping wastewater down manholes around Las Vegas and later “feigned compliance” and made false statements to inspectors about when the dumping had started, according to documents sent to Boring Company from the Clark County Water Reclamation District. The episode ended up causing “substantial damage” to the broader county infrastructure, and the regulator fined Boring Company nearly $500,000, the documents show. (Boring has not responded to Coins2Day’s multiple requests for comment on the matter)
To date, Boring has never paid a penalty to Nevada OSHA for any safety incidents on its job sites. The company is still contesting eight citations issued in 2023 by Nevada OSHA. As Boring Co. Has plowed ahead, Nevada OSHA has been one of the few checks on its practices. But the events of this spring have led some to call into question OSHA’s willingness or ability to wield its own authority.
For those underground, digging the tunnels, a perceived lack of consequence has sent a clear message: “It seems like people are going to have to die, because they won’t make sh*t safe for us,” one current Boring employee says.
Are you a current or former Boring Company employee with thoughts on this topic? Have a tip to share? Contact Jessica Mathews at [email protected] or [email protected], or through the secure messaging app Signal at jessica_mathews.36. You can also contact her on LinkedIn.
More coverage from Coins2Day on the Boring Company:
—Elon Musk’s Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into Las Vegas manholes—then ‘feigned compliance’ and was caught doing it again
—Tunneling halted at Boring Company job site in Las Vegas after ‘crushing injury’ of worker reported
—The CEO of the Las Vegas agency behind Boring Company’s first tunnel system says his team will be ‘more involved’ after safety incidents
—‘We have consistently flirted with death’: Elon Musk wanted the Boring Co. To build a tunnel system below Las Vegas. Former employees say they feared for their lives while working there