Kala the Tunnel Girl From TikTok Was Forced to Stop Project

The Gist:

• A woman named Kala who goes by Tunnel Girl on TikTok has been documenting her homemade storm shelter project.
• This involved digging beneath her house which shifted the project from storm shelter to tunnel system.
• The project was shut down in December 2023 after neighbors rightfully complained, but Kala said she’s “working it out.”

Tunnels have always had a certain amount of mystery and are endlessly fascinating. I would happily enter any sturdy, well-constructed tunnel. And when I write well-constructed, I mean made by man or the universe itself. Tunnels can also feel like magical places where dragons might be guarding a long-buried treasure, or they could very well be the entry point to another world entirely. Unfortunately, tunnels can also be terrifying.

For one TikToker, her interest in tunnels began with a project closer home. It’s so close to home that it’s actually beneath her very house. Kala, who goes by @engineer.everything on TikTok, has been given the name Tunnel Girl by fans who have been following her excavating journey since the beginning. However, things don’t appear to be entirely on the up and up when it comes to what’s going down and down below her home. What happened to Kala the Tunnel Girl? Let’s dig around for some answers.

“I am about to embark on a new and complex project,” said Kala in her first TikTok about what initially began as a storm shelter beneath her house. In October 2022 she took to social media to announce that this endeavor would take quite a bit of time and planning, and engineering of course. The shelter would be located off the side of what she called her “bunker/home office” and would start with cutting a sizable hole into some reinforced concrete blocks. There was no mention of Kala’s qualifications.

Less than week after starting Kala already had a ton of rock removed from the wall, but she encountered her first problem which was leakage. Once that was taken care of, Kala made her own mine elevator cart for removing debris and purchased an electric hoist for her handmade mine elevator. By November Kala was 13 feet into the shelter with only a few more bumps in the road to show for it. Well, I say “bumps,” but one issue was high levels of radiation. Yikes!

Suddenly in March 2023, Kala began referring to the storm shelter project as the “secret tunnel under her house.” It’s unclear when she made the switch, or why, but it was a significant update. She also stumbled upon stone she can use for other structures, like a castle Kala said she is planning on building. By December 2023, the storm shelter had become a “tunnel system.”