The mangled remains of a powerful Corvette — barely
recognizable to its former owner — were pulled from the depths of a
sinkhole at a Kentucky museum Wednesday, completing weeks of painstaking
work to retrieve eight classic cars that were gobbled up by the gaping
hole.
The 2001 Mallett Hammer Z06 Corvette was buried in dirt and
rocks, deep beneath the surface of the National Corvette Museum in
Bowling Green. The mood was somber as the crumpled car, which boasted
700 horsepower thanks to performance enhancements, was pulled to the
surface.
"It looks like a piece of tin foil," said Kevin
Helmintoller, of Land O’ Lakes, Fla., who donated the car to the museum
last December. "I’m still glad I’m here, because I would have never
believed it was this bad. I’m not positive I would have recognized it."
At
around the time it was donated, the car was appraised at $125,000
because of the performance modifications, said museum spokeswoman Katie
Frassinelli.
The cars looked like toys piled in a heap amid dirt
and concrete fragments after the 40-foot-wide-by-60-foot-deep sinkhole
opened beneath a museum display area in mid-February. It happened when
the museum was closed, and no one was injured.
The other cars that
took the plunge were 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 eight cars are widely believed to have a total
value exceeding $1 million, the museum said.
The museum owned six of the cars, and the other two — the ZR-1 Spyder and ZR1 Blue Devil — were on loan
from General Motors.
Sinkholes
are common in the Bowling Green area, which is located amid a large
region of bedrock known as karst where many of Kentucky’s largest and
deepest caves run underground.
With the retrieval now complete, the next task is to assess which cars are repairable.
"They
seem to run the gamut — from very minor or superficial damage to
catastrophic damage," said Monte Doran, a spokesman for Chevrolet, which
will oversee restoration of the cars in Michigan.
The first car
hoisted out in early March — the ZR1 Blue Devil — suffered only minor
damage that included cracks on lower door panels, a busted window and a
ruptured oil line. Workers got that car running, and cheers went up as
the engine revved.
The mood turned more dour as the damage became progressively worse as each car was pulled out.
The
white 1.5 Millionth Corvette recovered recently was flattened by the
weight of debris. The ZR-1 Spyder and the PPG Pace Car, also among the
final cars retrieved, sustained considerable damage as well, Frassinelli
said.
All eight cars will be on display at the museum through August.
The decisions about which ones to repair and which are too damaged to fix will be heart-wrenching.
"That’s going to be a fairly difficult discussion," Doran said.
Whether repair crews can retain the authenticity of each classic car will be a big factor, officials
said.
"It
would be fairly easy to go find another white 2009 Corvette and take as
many parts off that car and put them onto a new structure with the VIN
number of this (original) car," Doran said. "You start splitting the
line of — did we restore the 1.5 millionth car or did we build an
all-new car."
Cars considered too badly damaged won’t go on the scrap heap.
"I’m
sure that we’ll continue to display them as is. It’s now a part of
museum and Corvette history," Frassinelli said. "It’s interesting to
people. They aren’t going into storage somewhere."
The museum has
remained open, except for the area where the sinkhole occurred, and the
publicity has led to an attendance boost. Attendance in March was up 56
percent from the same month a year ago, Frassinelli said.
Publicity surrounding the massive sinkhole has led to an attendance boost at the museum, .
Repairs
to the museum, which is near the factory where the iconic Corvettes are
made, are expected to be completed by early August, ahead of the
museum’s late summer Corvette Caravan — a celebration marking the
museum’s 20th anniversary. Thousands of Corvette enthusiasts are
expected to converge in their models of the classic American sports car.
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