Museum officials say they received a call today from the security company at 5:45 AM alerting them to motion detector alarms going off in the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky. When they arrived, they were horrified to find a 40-foot-wide sinkhole in the middle of the museum’s exhibition floor and eight missing Corvettes. Located across the street from the GM Bowling Green Corvette assembly plant, the yellow cone-shaped museum houses Corvettes on loan from private owners and those “made famous by magazines and auto shows the world over”.
A total of eight classic Corvettes were swallowed by the “Corvette Sinkhole”, which is 30 feet deep. The models included a 1993 AR1 Spyder, 2009 ZR1 Blue Devil, 1962 Black Corvette, 1984 PPG Pace Car, 1992 White 1 Millionth Corvette, 1993 Ruby Red 40th Anniversary Corvette, 2001 Mallett Hammer Z06, and a 2009 White 1.5 Millionth Corvette. The museum staff was given permission by emergency personnel to remove the only surviving 1983 Corvette, which was at risk of falling into the sinkhole like the other cars.
Of the eight cars that fell, six were donated to the museum and two were owned by General Motors. Nobody was present in the museum at the time of the collapse.
Below are snippets of video from the event. The first part of the video was taken from museum security footage and shows the sinkhole opening up and swallowing the car. The last half features an RC helicopter flyover of the hole showing the cars inside the hole.
