TikTok Tunnel Girl

About

TikTok Tunnel Girl, also known as the Tunnel Lady, Tunnel Woman or Suburban Mine Lady, refers to @engineer.everything, an account run by a TikToker and woman named Kala who is excavating a tunnel system underneath a suburban house. Her content describing the process and challenges of tunnel building sparked discussion on TikTok and other platforms about the wisdom of building underground tunnel systems and the reasons why a person would be driven to do so.

Origin

The first post by @engineer.everything about the tunneling process appeared on October 23rd, 2022 (seen below left) and it received nearly 4,200 likes and 88,000 views in the course of a year.^[1] In the post, Kala describes the project as a "storm shelter," and goes into detail about the mental, financial, and physical challenges of the project. She went on to post regularly about the ups and downs of the process, producing a retrospective about one year of excavation (seen below right) on August 18th, 2023, which received over 7.3 million views and over 650,000 likes.^[2]

Spread

As Kala's following increased, so did the ambitions of the project. She created a tunnel, an antechamber, and began referring to it as a "suburban mine." Some commenters on Kala's videos pointed out similarities between her construction project and those of content creators like Colin Furze and Eel Pit Guy.

Other content creators posted explainers and commentary on Kala's mining project, such as @pablodiscoball who received almost 100,000 likes and 1.3 million views on TikTok^[3] on November 10th, 2023 explaining the "suburban mining project" and speculating that a major motive for Kala's mining is to find "building stones" in order to turn the front of her house into a castle.

However, discourse and controversy about Kala's project started to increase in December of 2023, with some accusing Kala of wrongdoing or putting her neighbors at risk. For example, @jackiectl posted a video to TikTok^[4] describing her "thoughts on the situation" that received nearly 60,000 likes and over 672,000 views in three days on December 26th, 2023 (seen below, left).TikToker @jackiectl described the mine as a possible sinkhole and argued that Kala was a software engineer, not a mechanical engineer, and so was misrepresenting her areas of expertise online. TikTok's^[5] @thesolarboi (seen below, right) pushed back against these arguments on December 29th, 2023, receiving nearly 11,000 likes and over 158,000 views for defending Kala and arguing that she would be less criticized if she were a man like Colin Furze.

On December 29th, 2023, @engineer.everything shared that civic authorities had investigated the project and shut it down pending permitting and evaluation. On TikTok,^[6] @engineer.everything made a reenactment of the situation (seen below) earning over 64,000 likes and 650,000 views in a day, and appeared optimistic that excavation could continue.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References