Last week, we gave breaking news about the National Corvette Museum in Kentucky and the early morning sinkhole that literally swallowed up several priceless cars (read the initial report here). A few days later, GM updated us with the announcement that they will be paying for and conducting the repairs on those vehicles (read that here). Now, the Museum has posted several videos of the sinkhole, including some remote-controlled helicopter footage by engineers looking at the damage.
It’s odd to watch these because the cars all look like toys in a sandbox rather than full-sized, highly-coveted sports cars down a huge pit in the middle of a building.
To start with, here is footage of where it all happened, the Skydome, from before the sinkhole; so you can get an idea of the scale and of the cars that were on display and sucked down in a matter of minutes (note that the video is from 2010, so not every car shown was in the dome at the collapse):
At around the 1:30 mark, several cars now in the sinkhole are shown, including the 1,000,000th ‘Vette and the ZR-1 Spyder.
The event itself was caught on security camera, but doesn’t show a lot of detail because of the camera angles. You can see those security films at this link and this one.
Here is a video of the Skydome taken immediately after the collapse, showcasing the scale and location of the hole. You can compare this to the video embedded above to get an idea of the space involved and carnage it created.
Now for the helicopter footage to get inside the hole and see how bad things really are for those eight cars down there. Many of them are literally buried while others are only partially damaged and a couple appear to be nothing more than a little dirty. Note that the helicopter is being used to survey the structural damage for engineering purposes, not to scout the cars, so you’ll have to bear through a lot of camera time looking at the walls of the sinkhole rather than the cars at the bottom.
Finally, here’s video of the people who take care of the cars that were removed from the Skydome after the disaster.
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