Sinkhole Swallows Corvette Museum

An unwanted surprise was visited upon the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky on Wednesday as a sinkhole opened up beneath the autos on display in the Sky Dome Wing sending many of them into a pit some 40 feet wide and 20 feet deep.

Luckily there were no patrons in the facility at the time. Motion detectors alerted security at 5:30 am that something was amiss.
“When you go in there, it’s unreal,” said museum spokeswoman Katie Frassinelli. “The hole is so big, it makes the Corvettes look like little Matchbox cars.”

Damage to the museum is estimated to be well above one million dollars not counting the loss of eight prized Corvettes that went tumbling into the hole.

— a 1962 “Black Corvette”
— a 1984 PPG pace car
— a 2009 ZR1 “Blue Devil”
— the 1992 white “1 Millionth Corvette”
— a 1993 ruby red “40th Anniversary Corvette”
— a 2001 Mallett Hammer Z06 Corvette
— the 2009 white “1.5 Millionth Corvette”
— a 1993 ZR-1 Spyder

Two of the six cars lost were on loan from General Motors, the manufacturer of the cars. The museum owned the remaining cars. The “1 Millionth Corvette” is an especially heartfelt loss as it is considered to be worth upwards of several million dollars to collectors on the auction market.