The National Corvette Museum has opened its Corvette Cave In! Skydome Sinkhole Experience.
More than two years have passed since a massive sinkhole opened up inside the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and now visitors can check out the Corvette Cave In! exhibit. The new exhibit features the renovated Skydome with all eight Corvettes that were swallowed up by the sinkhole. While the museum originally wanted to preserve the sinkhole, it determined that it wouldn’t be feasible, leading them to do the next best thing.
A line on the floor now outlines where the sinkhole was and a second line marks where the cave still resides. The museum added a 48-inch manhole that allows visitors to take a look into a glass window to see the floor of the sinkhole, which is more than 30 feet down.
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The exhibit, which is open to the public and is included with regular museum admission, is divided into multiple sections: The Day, Media Coverage, Pop Culture, Cars Affected, The Recovery, Karst Landscapes, What It Took to Fix the Sinkhole and The Grand Finale that combines photos, videos, informational text and interactive experiences that visitors of all ages can enjoy. There is even a crane game that visitors can play to remove boulders, debris and Corvettes from the sinkhole.
“Probably two days after the sinkhole happened, after we realized it could be fixed and once we saw more and more visitors starting to trickle in from the interstate, we shifted our attitude. We embraced the situation,” said Katie Frassinelli, marketing and communications manager for the Museum. “Honestly, it paid off big for us. Our attendance had leveled out around 150,000 in 2013, but in 2014 it skyrocketed to our highest number ever – over 250,000 visitors. Even last year we had 220,000 visitors… which if you remove our Corvette caravan event attendance from 2014 (a once-every-five-years blowout event), then 2015 was actually higher.”
