The American automotive world was rattled in 2014 when a 40-foot deep sinkhole suddenly opened under an exhibit at the National Corvette Museum and swallowed eight rare ’Vettes. Ten years after the catastrophe, the museum has curated an exhibit to commemorate the recovery efforts.
The plucky Bowling Green, Kentucky museum is calling the exhibit “Ground to Sky: The Sinkhole Reimagined,” and it features five of the eight cars that were swallowed by the sinkhole, including the still-crushed 1993 ZR-1 Spyder, and the 1.5 millionth Corvette that were both irreparably damaged in the accident. The restored cars featured in the exhibit are the Blue Devil 2009 ZR-1 that famously drove away after being extricated from the sinkhole, the GM-restored one-millionth Corvette, and the museum-restored 1962 Tuxedo Black Corvette. The exhibit also allows visitors to see the massive boulder that crushed the Mallett Hammer Corvette, and view the preserved portion of the sinkhole from above in the museum’s sky dome.
The exhibit documents the chronology of events necessary for the museum to recover the fallen Corvettes as well as recover from the nightmare of having a massive hole pop up overnight in the middle of your museum. In a partnership with The American Printing House For The Blind, “Ground To Sky” offers unique braille supplements to the exhibit that allows visually impaired folks to feel the design of the cars on plaques as well as read their harrowing recovery stories. The National Corvette Museum’s Director of Curatorial Affairs and Education Robert Maxhimer told Jalopnik:
Recovering from the sinkhole was a painstaking process and so was restoring the damaged Corvettes, but the exhibit is designed to be a look back at what happened ten years ago and what we’ve had to do as a museum since then.
The exhibit is open now through September 15 at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and it will be your last chance to see the sinkhole Corvettes before they return to long-term storage.