Sinkhole swallows eight cars at Corvette Museum

A sinkhole has opened up inside American's National Corvette Museum and swallowed eight vintage cars.

The hole, estimated to be about 13m wide and up to 10m deep, opened up in a domed section of the museum around 5.30am (local time) today, setting off an alarm and a call to local firefighters.

At the time no one was in the museum, in Bowling Green, Kentucky, so no injuries were reported.

But firefighters and museum personnel did find several damaged cars.

Pictures of the sinkhole show a collapsed section of floor with multiple cars visible inside the hole.

A few metres away, other Corvettes sit undamaged and undisturbed.

Six of the cars were owned by the museum and two — a 1993 ZR-1 Spyder and a 2009 ZR1 Blue Devil — were on loan from General Motors.

The other cars damaged were a 1962 black Corvette, a 1984 PPG Pace Car, a 1992 White 1 Millionth Corvette, a 1993 Ruby Red 40th Anniversary Corvette, a 2001 Mallett Hammer Z06 Corvette and a 2009 white 1.5 Millionth Corvette.

The damaged part of the museum has been closed off to visitors but the rest of the museum was opened later in the morning.

A structural engineer had been called to the museum to assess existing damage and the stability of the surrounding area.

Bowling Green sits in Kentucky's largest karst region, where many caves run underground and where the occasional sinkhole pops up.

This appeared to be the first sinkhole at the museum, however.

Author: Erin Tennant, Approving editor: Matthew Henry