Rewind: Digging Deep with TikTok's "tunnel girl"

Kella, known online as @engineer.everything or "Tunnel Girl," has drawn nearly half a million TikTok followers by documenting her multi-year effort to excavate a tunnel system beneath her suburban Virginia home. Starting in 2022 as a planned storm shelter, the project expanded into chambers and passages—reaching 22 feet below grade, with branches she calls a "secret labyrinth" or "suburban mine." She handles most work solo, self-teaching skills like rebar tying, concrete pouring, and welding, while hauling rubble via a homemade crane from a basement window 14 feet underground.

Project Scope and Methods

Kella announced the endeavor in an October 2022 TikTok, cutting a door into her concrete basement wall and acknowledging its high cost and zero ROI—"a dumb project, but I really wanted to do it." Videos show her progress: tying 1,000 feet of rebar with 500 feet of wire, standing under 5,000 pounds of wet concrete held by her engineering, and welding steel forms underground. By September 2023, the entrance tunnel extended 30 feet in and 10 feet down, leading to a 10-by-6-foot chamber. She harvests excavated stone for potential future use, like building a castle, and explains her drive as restlessness from a desk job: "I can, so I will." No formal engineering training in this domain is evident, and she works largely alone.