Copyright Fortune
Boring Co. president Steve Davis was on the line. Boring Company was challenging citations from Nevada’s workplace safety regulator blaming it for chemical burns two firefighters had suffered in its tunnels during a training exercise. By the next afternoon, a group of high-ranking state officials, including the governor’s state infrastructure coordinator who took the call, were convened in a room with Davis, who was himself wrapping up a stint in Washington D.C. helping Musk run the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). At the beginning of that meeting, the citations and fines—among the agency’s largest in a decade and a potential threat to Boring’s plans to build tunnels in other U.S. cities—were summarily rescinded. Soon, something else disappeared: The record of the Governor’s office meeting with Musk’s company was removed from a public document without explanation. More irregularities in the case file occurred: Documents weren’t saved to the file, and a document intended to provide reasoning for revoking the citations was left out. The sequence of events, which Fortune is the first to report, raised alarm and has had a chilling effect within Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, according to an OSHA staffer as well as someone who worked on the case, and it raises questions about the degree to which a powerful business is able to bend regulatory guardrails to its will and skirt proper oversight, especially as Musk’s consortium of companies become increasingly intertwined with Nevada’s economy. AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Image “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 Fortune, 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 Fortune’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. Regarding the meeting, Williams said that the Governor’s office “frequently receives complaints and inquiries” from employers and that “it is standard practice” for the Governor’s office to reach out to leadership to assist with complaints and inquiries. She said that the Governor’s office has never directed Nevada agencies to resolve complaints and that, in this instance, it would have supported an agency decision to keep 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. The Boring Company’s project, which aims to build an 104-station network of underground tunnels connecting the Convention Center to the airport, the Las Vegas Strip, and Allegiant Stadium, is one of several major investments that Elon Musk has made in Nevada, including the $7 billion Tesla Gigafactory, which employs more than 17,000 construction and factory workers and has drawn other partner companies to set up shop nearby. As the fallout from the closed investigation has been quietly playing out behind the scenes, more safety incidents have occurred on Boring project sites in Las Vegas, under what one recently departed employee described as a “cowboy” culture regarding safety protocols. A worker’s pelvis was crushed in September; a different employee was shocked by an electrical panel this summer; and the harsh chemicals that burned the firefighters, part of a toxic muck fluid that pools in the tunnels, remain an ever-present danger for Boring workers, according to five current and former employees at the Boring Company, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retribution. One former employee described how workers would often kneel in the muck, not even realizing they were being burned until it was happening. “They go to peel off their sock,” they said, “And a big old chunk of skin comes off.” Meanwhile, a current Nevada OSHA employee says that the OSHA staffers working on the agency’s ongoing investigations into Boring (one of which involves the crushed worker) are frightened they will “get disciplined for doing their job.” “It’s very political right now,” they added. This account of the firefighter injuries in Boring Co. tunnels, the Governor’s office involvement, and the aborted penalties is based on interviews with and statements from Nevada regulators and current or former Nevada OSHA employees, interviews with current and former Boring Co. employees, analysis from attorneys practicing in Nevada, and hundreds of pages of documents, including calendars, emails, photographs, and notes, related to OSHA’s inspection that were either obtained via several Freedom of Information Act Requests or shared privately with Fortune. Boring Company and Davis did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. A fire drill gone awry Musk’s Boring Co. bills itself as a new kind of transportation system, with ambitions to dig a vast “underground highway” for Teslas to zip through under the streets of Las Vegas, Nashville, and eventually other cities. It’s raised more than $900 million in funding over the years, according to PitchBook, including from some of Silicon Valley’s top investment firms such as Sequoia Capital. Boring’s short 4-mile stretch underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center and to two casinos, is, thus far, the lone working example of this vision. But Boring Co. President Davis, a long-time lieutenant to Musk’s various businesses, is racing to expand the Las Vegas “Loop” tunnel into the city and other areas of the broader county. Rachel Aston/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images 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 Fortune 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 Fortune. 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 Fortune. Approximately thirteen fire units arrived for the drill on December 9, parking around the training site and at the Centerfolds strip club down the street. 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 Fortune 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. 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 Fortune. 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 Fortune 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 Fortune. “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.” Nevada OSHA’s official procedures allow for an appeals process where companies can object to the citations, in writing, and set up an informal meeting with OSHA to ask for the penalties to be modified or even withdrawn. Once the governor’s office was looped in however, none of this ever happened. Multiple sources, including current and former Nevada OSHA employees, regulators, and employment lawyers, told Fortune that it’s inappropriate for the Governor’s office and political appointees to get involved in a specific OSHA inspection—even one involving a high-profile company. Jess Lankford, the former Nevada OSHA chief administrative officer, said the Governor’s office getting involved is “not the way it’s supposed to work.” Irregularities in the public record and special treatment for ‘large employers’ 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 Fortune’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 Fortune. Moreover, a key document in OSHA’s Boring Company inspection file was altered, according to two people with knowledge of the matter and documents seen by Fortune. A line in the OSHA case diary—the only reference in the case file to a meeting with the Governor’s office—was deleted, the people said. Fortune compared the public record it received from OSHA to an earlier version obtained from sources that had been available to all agency staff on its server, and confirmed that the line item documenting the meeting had been deleted 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. “From an attorney’s standpoint, it looks really bad,” said Ron Zambrano, the employment litigation chair at West Coast Trial Lawyers, which represents plaintiff-side clients in California and Nevada. “You did something very unusual with this embarrassing thing, which is try to hide it,” he added. The case file included other discrepancies, including an incorrect date on a key document, missing worksheets detailing the rationale behind the citations that Nevada OSHA said were “apparently not saved into the file”, and another document that was “inadvertently omitted.” Regarding the deleted entry for the Governor’s office meeting, officials did not contest that the line item had been deleted, but emphasized that no supervisors had directed its deletion. Reilly, from Governor Lombardo’s office, said 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,” adding that the “insinuation” that these officers had directed such a deletion was “incorrect.” Nevada OSHA spokeswoman Williams also disputed that Nevada agencies had tried to conceal the meeting and said they were forthcoming about the meeting to Fortune. Nevada OSHA updated the case file after Fortune’s inquiries, and shared a new copy of the case diary, in which there is now an update at the bottom, describing a May 29 “collaborative meeting w/ employer” in which Boring Company was told “OSHA was withdrawing the citation.” The case diary still no longer mentions that representatives from the Governor’s office were present. (To read Nevada’s OSHA full response to comment for this story, click here.) Meanwhile, the state has revised its OSHA policies in ways that could ultimately make it more difficult or take longer for the agency to impose such fines on larger employers like the Boring Co. Carreón, the DIR Administrator, said her agency conducted a “quality review process” after the Boring case, and implemented new policies and new procedures. Among them is a mandatory 30-day lawyer review period and notification to the Public Information Officer in “high-profile” or “large-scale employer” cases. The goal, Carreón said, is to improve the quality of Nevada OSHA case files and make sure that what was included in them would be “legally sufficient.” Williams stressed that OSHA employees have been assured that they have “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. ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images ‘They won’t make sh*t safe for us’ In the tunnels below Las Vegas, the mission to construct the subterranean highway system continues. Three current and former Boring Co. employees, who have all worked at the company this year, say that pressure to speed up the project has heightened since June—when Steve Davis returned to his day-to-day role at the company after his brief stint helping Musk run DOGE. That month—just after the citations had been issued, then retracted—employees started seeing Davis around again. Three employees who worked at Boring in June said they would see Davis being whisked to and from various project sites, escorted by an armed bodyguard in a Cadillac Escalade. Five current and former Boring employees who spoke with Fortune say the same safety issues persist, with two reporting that chemical burns seem to happen “daily.” When asked to describe safety protocols and training, one employee who left in recent weeks put it simply: “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. Within Nevada’s workplace safety watchdog agency, meanwhile, the unusual reversal of the citations is having ripple effects. Two staffers say they were alarmed by the handling of the incident and the speed at which the citations were withdrawn, and that these actions have made agency employees fear inspecting or regulating Boring Co. in the future, particularly because two employees that worked on the Boring Co. investigation were demoted or written up (Williams said Nevada OSHA wouldn’t comment on “specific personnel actions taken in this case or any other.”) One of the people who worked on the case said that they and many colleagues worried that the agency’s ability to independently enforce safe working conditions and accountability had been compromised in order to appease one of Nevada’s (and the world’s) most high-profile business magnates. 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 Fortune’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 jessica.mathews@fortune.com or jessica.m101@proton.me, or through the secure messaging app Signal at jessica_mathews.36. You can also contact her on LinkedIn.
