National Corvette Museum. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
The collapse struck before dawn on February 12, 2014 From being a catastrophe for a specialized car museum in Bowling Green, the incident became one of its biggest draws. Over a decade later, the sinkhole continues to be a permanent fixture of the museum’s collection, a reminder that even structures designed to house some of the rarest cars in American history can fall prey to the karstic formation in much of Kentucky’s landscape.
The Blue Devil was refurbished by GM and unveiled at the museum in February 2015, one year after the accident. The One Millionth Corvette took even longer, not returning to display until September 2015, after more than 1,200 hours of restoration work. Much of the hole was filled in and floored over by mid-2015 for structural safety, leaving only an outlined footprint and a small viewing opening. The Corvette Cave-In exhibit, built around that footprint, opened in February 2016, exactly two years after the collapse, letting visitors see where the hole once was alongside the cars it damaged. Soil and stone samples taken from the sinkhole are sold in the gift shop of the museum at $10 per piece, and according to reports from the Associated Press and All That’s Interesting, thousands of pieces have been sold since the opening of the exhibition.
Consequently, a later geological investigation discovered that the collapse resulted from the roof of a karst cave in the area under the Skydome that had slowly grown larger due to the erosive nature of the groundwater, according to Cars and Karst: Investigating the National Corvette Museum Sinkhole by Polk et al. (2015). Because of this fact that when the roof of this limestone cave could no longer hold up the weight on top of it, it caved in, it is. Because of heavy damage sustained during the fall, out of the eight cars that were found, five were not able to be fully restored.
there were other cars that needed a lot of effort for the restoration While some were restored quite fast. Rather than erasing all trace of it, the museum’s board opted to preserve part of the sinkhole’s story as a permanent attraction.
