TikTok Tunnel Girl returns with a permit allowing her to keep tunnel
Kala the Science Girl, also affectionately known as Tunnel Girl, is digging back in after receiving a permit to continue her intricate tunnel work under her Northern Virginia home.
We first met Kala in January 2024, but her work on the tunnel system under her house began years prior. She amassed more than half a million followers on TikTok, where she documented the process of digging.
While many enjoyed watching Kala's tunnel progress, others were not so happy. After posting updates for nearly two years, Kala's tunnel project was shut down.
"They did give me a stop work order and are requiring an immediate evaluation by a professional engineer. Fortunately contrary to rumors here, it is constructed entirely below the slab of my house and it shouldn't be too hard to get the permits and approval," she said in a TikTok posted in 2024.
Now, more than a year later, Kala is digging back in and spoke with WUSA9 about the process.
"I've had to go and get a lot of engineering certifications, a lot of tests, and provide a lot of documentation and provide a lot of calculations and information for the permit process. None of that was wrong, it's very, very thorough and we did a good job," she told WUSA9 at her home Monday.
The tunnel is not Kala's first project shared on TikTok. She says she started posting photos of a four-story addition to her home after seeing videos of other DIY projects on the platform.
"It was so unique building a four-story addition off the backside of my house by myself and it would have been really neat because I'm watching all these TikTok videos of people who are doing their own projects and like I missed it," Kala said. "If I did that project just a few years later, I could have done it on TikTok and it would have been mostly for me to look back at later and say oh this was the project that I did and uh so I was like what other kind of project can I do?"
That is when she got the idea to dig a tunnel, a project she had always wanted to do.
"I thought this is perfect. I can do this as a project, upload it on TikTok, maybe people will be interested maybe they won't, but either way I'll have footage for myself to look back on in the future," she said.
Kala had thought about digging the tunnel for several years, calling it the most challenging and complex project one could do.
"There's a lot of mathematics, there's a lot of engineering, there's a lot of things that can go wrong, complexity in working underground, then just excavating and say an open pit."
Kala started digging in 2022. She explained that while there were some hiccups at the beginning, including trying to figure out if it was even possible to dig under the rock and the soil and not have it all come down.
"How can I do that safely?" Kala said she asked herself.
In the end, Kala decided to excavate around five feet to see if the tunnel was possible. She then dug out another five feet...
But the tunnel didn't stop there.
"It goes about 30 feet down, the first tunnel," Kala said. "Then there's a small landing area, about 5 by 10, and then it goes down another 20 feet."
"Where does it go?" WUSA9's Katie Lusso asked.
"It just stops," Kala answered.
However, the tunnel won't stop there forever, as Kala hopes to continue digging after applying for even more permits.
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