Here’s what it’s like to dig tunnels at Elon Musk’s Boring Company

There are longstanding rivalries in the world of startups: growth versus discipline—innovation versus safety.

There may be few places where this tension is playing out so plainly as it is at Elon Musk’s Boring Company, the tunnel construction startup backed by Sequoia Capital and Vy Capital that is valued at more than $5.6 billion. Yesterday I published an investigation for Fortune, where I wrote about the dozens of injuries and safety complaints that have stacked up as Boring digs a tunnel system below Las Vegas.

I spent several months talking to the workers on the ground who have been tasked with turning Musk’s ambitious underground transit system vision into reality. Boring’s former safety manager, Wayne Merideth, described the working conditions as “almost unbearable.” Thousands of pages from an OSHA investigation from this summer showed workers suffering from heat exhaustion, knee or head contusions, or an elbow or hand being crushed. Former Boring employees described getting chemical burns as they waded or walked through a cement mixture that pooled with water in the base of the tunnels. OSHA ultimately issued Boring eight citations, finding some of its working conditions to be potentially fatal to employees and that Boring didn’t provide its employees with the proper safety equipment, training, and washing stations to protect themselves. (Boring ignored my requests for comment, though it vehemently denied OSHA’s findings in communications with the agency and is contesting them. Sequoia declined to comment, and other investors didn’t respond.)

Here’s what one employee documented in an emailed complaint to Merideth:

“I feel that the company as a whole has been very fortunate these past few months that there hasn’t been a fatality,” the employee from the Bastrop, Texas, worksite wrote at 1:53 a.m. in the email, which was seen by Fortune. “We have consistently flirted with death.”

The employee told Merideth in the email that, just recently, six of 12 passive articulation cylinders—the parts of the machine that would help Boring’s tunneling machine turn as it digs through the earth—failed while he was inside it, meaning that it “could have split with me inside it.” No one had warned him, he said. The employee wrote about a lack of accountability, and that he had “lost all confidence” in the company’s management to keep him safe.

“I have watched my friends get injured due to the fast pace we’ve been running,” he wrote. “I refuse to be the first fatality in this company’s history. No tunnel is worth a single person’s life.”

Long hours and weekends, high expectations, and rigid deadlines are hallmarks of Elon Musk’s companies: Tesla, SpaceX, and X, formerly Twitter. And construction is inherently one of the most dangerous industries in America.

But in the case of Boring, run by president Steve Davis, pressure to meet aggressive goals led to a disregard for the safety of workers who were testing and building the tunnels underground and controlling dangerous equipment, according to findings from Fortune. All of this raises an important question: Innovation at what cost?

You can read the full story here.

See you tomorrow,

Jessica Mathews
Twitter: @jessicakmathews
Email: jessica.mathews@fortune.com
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Joe Abrams curated the deals section of today's newsletter.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com