After launching VICE Culture Club with Oobah Butler’s schemes and social experiments, host Jackson Garrett takes the series underground. This time, he sits down with Kala, known on TikTok as Engineer Everything, the creator behind one of the internet’s most insane engineering feats.
Now three years into her project, Kala’s built an 80-foot passage that drops more than 30 feet below her Northern Virginia home. It’s complete with sump pits, drainage systems, and an official city permit that makes it all legal.
Garrett asks the questions that kept the internet obsessed: Is it safe? Is it legal? How deep can she go before it becomes a mine? And most of all—why?
Kala doesn’t hesitate in her response. A former software engineer, she’s turned her coding instincts into hands-on problem-solving. “We have a lot of ego,” she says. “Since I don’t have that level of experience, I just compensate by overbuilding.” Her “overbuilding” includes reinforced concrete walls, a homemade elevator, and fourteen dumpsters of excavated rock.
When local officials ordered her to stop, Kala hired geotechnical and structural engineers, navigated months of bureaucracy, and returned with approval for what the city now classifies as a “storage tunnel.”After a year of red tape, the permit cleared, and Kala fired up her jackhammer. Her first viral moment occurred in 2022 when she wired a welder outlet incorrectly and got roasted by electricians. Instead of backing off, she used the criticism to learn in real time. That mix of trial and error and transparency turned her into a social media DIY cult icon.
Now she’s spent about $100,000, burned through ten jackhammers, and still spends nights after work digging. She’s not chasing fame or fortune. She’s chasing the feeling. “People always ask why,” she says. “My answer is usually, why not?”
Before they wrap it up, Garrett tours the tunnel with her on camera—33 feet underground, surrounded by raw stone and rebar—as she explains what drives someone to keep digging. She talks about how people tend to stay within what they know, and how trying something new can change how you see yourself.
Watch Kala: The TikTok Tunnel Girl on VICE Culture Club now on YouTube, where she explains why curiosity itself is reason enough to keep going.
The post Kala, TikTok’s Tunnel Girl, Dug 80 Feet Under Her House and the Government Couldn’t Stop Her (Exclusive) appeared first on VICE.
