Bastrop County, Texas, residents who spoke with Fox News criticized the Boring Company over its request to dump up to 142,500 gallons of treated wastewater per day into the local drinking water supply.
“The thought of this happening is horrifying,” Erin, who runs an organic farm near the Boring Company facility, told Fox News. “This stuff — and we don’t even know what it is — going into the river that we depend on for food production.”
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“The river is not far from me,” Tommy, whose family has owned Bastrop County farmland for several generations, told Fox News. “I just worry about everybody that’s gonna be connected with the river.”
Elon Musk’s Boring Company, which constructs tunnels, requested a state permit through an affiliate, Gapped Bass LLC last July to discard the treated wastewater from its Bastrop County facilities into a local stretch of the Colorado River, the Austin American-Statesman reported. Locals voiced concerns about the requested permit during a Tuesday hearing before the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ).
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“I actually got a letter from the TCEQ that my neighbor was applying to discharge wastewater,” Chap, a Bastrop County resident, told Fox News while waiting to attend the hearing. “I learned that neighbor was Elon, and I had some concerns.”
Tasha, also of Bastrop County, described the wastewater dumping plan as “a hot mess” while standing outside Tuesday’s meeting site.
“Elon, if you see this, I want you to know that you need to get your mess together because this is a hot mess,” she said. “You need to recognize what you are doing to a community and its water source.”
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The Texas commission must meet with locals who say they’ll be affected by the action and collect their comments before moving forward with a permit approval process, an Austin ABC affiliate reported Wednesday.
“This is just a short-term solution, and ultimately we hope to not even utilize the full capacity of what’s being authorized,” a Gapped Bass representative, Rajit Patel, said at the hearing. He walked through treatment process the wastewater will undergo before entering the local water supply.
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Still, Roxanne, a Bastrop County resident, said she believed that Musk and the Boring Company were “taking something away” from locals who enjoy “the pleasure of raising children here and being able to enjoy that river the way we do now.”
“We love the Colorado River,” the mother told Fox News while waiting to attend the meeting. “He will absolutely destroy our love because it will turn to fear.”
The Boring Company did not respond to a request for comment.
To hear more Texans sound off on the Boring Company’s plans to dump wastewater into the Colorado River, click here.
