Sinkhole that swallowed eight Corvettes opens up new opportunity for struggling car museum as visitor numbers soar in rush to see 40ft wide crater



National Corvette Museum decides to keep hole as tourist attraction

Some of the classic cars salvaged from crater could be put back inside

The huge sinkhole that swallowed up eight cars in Kentucky's National Corvette Museum is to become a permanent attraction.

The museum's owners decided to keep the gaping hole after visitor numbers soared in the months after it appeared.



They have even considered putting a couple of the Corvettes that were damaged when they plunged into it back into the sink hole.



Attraction: The Corvette Museum plans to keep part of the sinkhole that opened up in February

Attraction: The damaged Corvettes were pulled from the hole to great fanfare.

At a meeting in Bowling, Kentucky on Wednesday the museum board voted to preserve the 40ft wide crater that appeared in February.



What started as a tragedy soon turned into an opportunity to lure more visitors off a nearby interstate to visit the museum, which struggled in recent years to keep its doors open.

'This gives us one more asset ... to be able to attract those folks that maybe just having Corvettes on display would not get them to come here,' Wendell Strode, the museum's executive director, said.



'We think it will continue for some time to be of great interest,' he added.



The damaged cars toppled like toys amid rocks, concrete and dirt when the sinkhole opened in the museum's Skydome.



The cars carry a total value believed to exceed $1 million. The extent of damage varies widely from vehicle to vehicle.

Unique: The option of keeping part of the 60-foot-long, 45-foot-wide, 30-foot-deep sinkhole open lost favor due to the costs of safety features and maintenance, officials said

The cars were eventually pulled out of the giant hole to great fanfare and visitors were invited to take a close look at the sinkhole and the damaged vehicles.

Attendance at the museum, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, was up nearly 60 percent from March to the start of this week, compared to the year-ago period, officials said.



Sign-ups for museum memberships also rose sharply, as did merchandise and cafe sales at the museum, which has started to sell sinkhole-related shirts, post cards and prints.

Museum board members considered three options for the sinkhole: fill it in, preserve the entire sinkhole or keep a portion of it.

They opted to maintain about half the 40ft-wide, 60ft-deep sinkhole, Strode said. There's a 'strong probability' that one or two of the damaged cars will be put back in the hole, he said.

The project's estimated cost is $3 million to $5 million, Strode said. How much insurance will cover is still being determined, he added.

Salvaged: Some of the cars that were plucked from the 60ft deep hole could be dropped back inside

Plans are to leave the entire sinkhole and the eight Corvettes on display through the end of August, and construction on the 'revised' sinkhole would then begin in September, the museum said.



The last cars had been pulled out of the sinkhole in April, revealing far greater damage than had been expected.



‘The last three or four cars that came out of the sinkhole ... we didn't expect them to come out looking quite that bad,’ Dana Forrester, lead Corvette restoration member of the museum', said.

Among the wrecked vehicles was a custom-made car that was able to hit 175mph before it was reduced to ‘just a tire'.

Jason Swanson, a University of Kentucky assistant professor in hospitality management and tourism, said keeping some of the hole is a smart decision.

'It's definitely a good thing to maintain some of that attraction that happened, to continue to capitalize on that,' he said.



'Putting the cars down there is a great idea. It lets people see some of the actual damage that can be done by nature.'

Damage: This 1993 40th anniversary car was one of the vehicles left mangled by the sinkhole

No final decision has been made on how many of the cars will be repaired. Chevrolet stepped forward to oversee restoration efforts.

The cars that took the plunge were a 2001 Mallett Hammer Z06 Corvette, a 1962 black Corvette, a 1993 ZR-1 Spyder, a 1984 PPG Pace Car, a 1992 White 1 Millionth Corvette, a 2009 white 1.5 Millionth Corvette, a 2009 ZR1 Blue Devil and a 1993 Ruby Red 40th Anniversary Corvette.

The museum owned six of the cars, and the other two were on loan from General Motors.

Sinkholes are common in the Bowling Green area, which is amid a large region of karst bedrock where many of Kentucky's largest and deepest caves are.