‘Tunnel girl’ gets heart emojis, sneers over mining project beneath Virginia home

In the real world, the one where thousands of people aren’t critiquing her every move, Kala is a soft-spoken software engineer — successful enough to own a spacious two-story house on a Northern Virginia cul-de-sac.

In the realm of social media, she is known as “tunnel girl,” the DIY evangelist in a hard hat who, since fall 2022, has been posting video updates about her solo effort to construct a storm shelter beneath her home, complete with a tunnel entrance — inspiring praise, ridicule and some conspiracy theories along the way.

Those videos — the most popular seen by 7.7 million viewers on Kala’s @engineer.everything TikTok account as of this week — recently prompted the town of Herndon to shut down the project after a neighbor, expressing concerns about a joke Kala made in one video about wanting dynamite to make the digging go faster, asked: “Is this okay for her to do?”

“I always saw huge piles of dirt leaving her property to the point that she pays for a dump truck to get the dirt out,” the neighbor wrote to Herndon officials in an early December complaint, saying they only realized what was happening beneath the house after a friend shared links to some of her videos.

Herndon officials said in a statement that, upon receiving the complaint, they stepped in to put a halt to the work until they can be sure the structure is safe and complies with local building codes. A new storm shelter would require a permit.

The homeowner spoke on the condition that she be referred to only as Kala — the same name she uses on social media — because of fears for her safety. She declined to comment on the town’s action, expressing concern that more publicity would jeopardize her ability to go forward with the nearly completed project. Among other things, she has broken through a basement wall to create a tunnel entrance, mined dirt and rock and removed it with a makeshift elevator, welded support structures in place, siphoned away groundwater that initially pooled into the subterranean floor, and lined the structure with cement.

“I didn’t expect this to get such a huge following,” Kala, 37, said about her TikTok videos, which typically cover the finer engineering aspects of her construction, with Kala narrating. She is not a trained engineer but taught herself how to do the work, relying on YouTube videos and reading, she said.

She said she started filming her work and sharing it online as a way to document a passion project that she had long dreamed of taking on after buying her home in 2010. She also has a YouTube page dedicated to the project.

Kala said she has taken on other major home improvements — including handling most of a house addition with a new kitchen, a second-floor workspace, and a basement and subbasement area — but hadn’t thought of sharing the details on social media until she noticed other DIY projects posted online.

Unlike those videos, her venture has gone viral, with observers filling the comments sections of her posts with heart emojis, questions about the project’s legality or attempts at humor.

“What are you preparing for? Do I need to prepare too? What do you know!?” one commenter wrote.

Some of her viewers are under the false impression that she is digging a mine. Others believe she is tunneling below her neighbors’ properties for some unknown but nefarious purpose.

Most ask versions of the same question: “Why?”

Kala explains in her first video that building her own storm shelter is just “something I’ve wanted to do,” while poking fun at herself by placing a “stupid project!” label next to her image while going over how she intends to accomplish it.

“This project is going to be enormously expensive and will have zero return on investment,” she says in the same video.

Over time, she began courting the growing reaction by playing up some mishaps, such as a brief tunnel fire caused while welding, or a near miss with a large rock that unexpectedly dropped from above her while she was clearing out debris.

After Herndon officials visited the site, Kala posted a reenactment of the exchange, under the title “Shut down!” where the actor playing a town inspector adopted a gruff Midwestern accent.

Her rising popularity has spawned a subcategory of social media posts dedicated to praising or criticizing her, which have seeded even more debate about the “tunnel girl.”

“This doesn’t just affect you; this also affects everyone around you,” the English-accented host of one such YouTube site said, addressing Kala after highlighting a dispute over whether her mostly Latino neighbors in Herndon knew about the project and had concerns about safety.

Amid the extra attention, Kala has stopped posting online. But the comments have kept rolling in.

“Kala must be protected at all cost! We need her to finish her project since we’re all invested this far! Good luck Kala!” one commenter recently wrote in response to her “Shut down!” video.

“yes keep going till she reaches your house woohoo,” someone else responded.