The National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Ky., was hit by sinkhole Wednesday, Feb. 12, that swallowed up eight one-of-a-kind Chevrolet sports cars.

Sinkhole Reaches 40ft Across, 30ft Deep

The sinkhole began forming at 5:39 a.m., when motion sensors in the museum alerted staffers to movement in the museum. When staff of the Corvette Museum arrived, they found part of the floor had completely collapsed, taking eight cars on display with it. The fire department was called to the scene as was a structural engineer.

The sinkhole reportedly grew to 40 feet across and about 30 feet deep, but the rest of the building, named the Skydrome, remains structurally sound.

“When you go in there, it’s unreal. The hole is so big, it makes the Corvettes look like little Matchbox cars,” said Katie Frassinelli, the museum spokeswoman.

The six cars owned by the museum are covered by insurance, but two of the eight cars damaged by the freak event were loaned to them by General Motors. When asked about the damage to the cars and potential monetary loss, General Motors Heritage Center Manager, Greg Wallace, said he is simply happy that no one was injured.

“We’re just tickled that no one was hurt; that thing was deep. We really don’t know yet what the value of the cars is, but we’ll fix them up and you’ll never know they were damaged,” Wallace told The New York Times.

The cars damaged in the sinkhole include one 1962 “Black Corvette,” a 1984 PPG pace car, a 2009 ZR1 “Blue Devil,” the 1992 white “1 Millionth Corvette,” the 1993 ruby red “40th Anniversary Corvette,” one 2001 Mallett Hammer Z06 Corvette, the 2009 white “1.5 Millionth Corvette” and one 1993 ZR-1 Spyder.

Only one car, a 1983 Corvette, located near the sinkhole on the showroom floor, could be salvaged when authorities allowed the staff to carefully remove it from the floor. Luckily, 20 other cars that were in the museum were far enough away from the damage to be easily moved out of harms way.

The focus now is to safely extract the Corvettes from the sinkhole, and the damaged area of the museum will be closed indefinitely. However, the museum will open again on Thursday, Feb. 13.

What Caused The Sinkhole?

The exact geological reason for this sinkhole has yet to be determined, but experts theorize that the surrounding area is built upon deep caves and sinking streams.

“There’s a good chance that there’s a cave that the soil below the building was eroding into,” said James Currens, who works with the Kentucky Geological Survey.

– Olivia Truffaut-Wong

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