video: Corvette Museum sinkhole - Drone goes inside sinkhole - 8 cars lost
Ron Czapala
Posts: 2,418
Corvette museum sinkhole
The news that eight valuable 'vettes at Bowling Green, Kentucky's National Corvette Museum fell victim to a 40-foot-wide, 20-feet-deep sinkhole has triggered a collective gasp from the worldwide Corvette Nation.
"I was shocked," said Frazer Bharucha, 47, a Corvette owner since age 17. "We're talking about iconic cars that have been around for years."
The painful losses have been tallied: Of the eight cars that fell, six were donated to the museum by Corvette enthusiasts, and two are owned by the car's maker, General Motors. Among them were a 1962 Black Corvette, a 1984 PPG Pace Car, and a 1993 ZR-1 Spyder. The total value of the damaged cars is "substantial," said museum executive director Wendell Strode.
The news that eight valuable 'vettes at Bowling Green, Kentucky's National Corvette Museum fell victim to a 40-foot-wide, 20-feet-deep sinkhole has triggered a collective gasp from the worldwide Corvette Nation.
"I was shocked," said Frazer Bharucha, 47, a Corvette owner since age 17. "We're talking about iconic cars that have been around for years."
The painful losses have been tallied: Of the eight cars that fell, six were donated to the museum by Corvette enthusiasts, and two are owned by the car's maker, General Motors. Among them were a 1962 Black Corvette, a 1984 PPG Pace Car, and a 1993 ZR-1 Spyder. The total value of the damaged cars is "substantial," said museum executive director Wendell Strode.
Comments
What a loss.
Guess there's going to be a new Kentucky cave venue.
But where does the FAA authority begin? In this case, the entire flight is indoors. Does the FAA have control over that? What if I took a helicopter inside a big, closed stadium? Would I need a pilot's licence or could I just take my best shot?
Man that hurts. What are the odds of that happening? Is there sinkhole insurance?
Notice the journalist is standing in what looks to be a large drainage basin right next to the "dome" building?
dgately
What kind of building codes exist there, really?
I'd expect a building that's NOT on bedrock to have a proper foundation and floor in case something happens to the ground below it.
to lead to collapse as happened here in 1988: http://www.flickr.com/photos/21804434@N02/3279171284/
(no casualties)
Old salt / brine and coal mines are a common cause of (normally undramatic) subsidence:
http://coal.decc.gov.uk/en/coal/cms/services/reports/mining_report/mining_report.aspx
There was a recent UK TV documentary on Florida sinkholes but it didn't mention any risks
outside that state, though I have heard of the Lake Peigneur disaster...
So why not build a proper floor that can hold up even if a void appears underneath it?
http://www.itv.com/news/london/2014-02-03/sinkhole-outside-buckinghamshire-home-swallows-car/
Not a sinkhole but a tunnel collapse at Heathrow in 1999:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/280107.stm
The FAA regulates the public airspace, so inside a building doesn't count.
One interesting thing about commercial UAVs is that the FAA looks at the UAV in a different light if it is tethered to the ground so I've seen commercial UAV demos of quad copter with a 400' string attached to it, making it legal. BTW currently the FAA does not allow ANY commercial use of UAVs in the US. Yes, a company can partner with a select public entity, get FAA approval, and then fly, but it has to be for research and the data collected has to be made public so that no one gets an edge.
Also, teaching students how to fly UAVs outside is also not allowed even if it's a public school. I know of one school that gets around this by flying inside a hanger and working with a military base that has it's own restricted airspace for when they want to fly outside.
There was a documentary on the BBC I believe showing how fragile concrete can be without reinforcement, it can be stressed and then explodes with devastating consequences if there is no steel to spread the stress.
I've heard that rebar rusts over time and can cause structural failures.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide also neutralizes the alkalinity of concrete, and concrete is porous, so it is usual to require rebar to be at least four inches from any surface of the concrete it is reinforcing. Even this, however, is only a delaying tactic; on the time scale of Roman constructions, most of what we have built with reinforced concrete will disintegrate as the CO2 and oxygen eventually get to the reinforcing steel.
Roman concrete is very different from Portland cement; in fact, the formula was only recently rediscovered. It's not alkaline at all and would not work well with reinforcement. But the Romans understood their material and used its compressive strength and mass to advantage. The Romans built arches and domes, some of them impressively large, but they did not build large flat sheets like the foundation of the car museum because those would have crumbled under their own weight. For floors the Romans preferred bricks or tiles, which would have revealed the subsidence long before it became catastrophic. And of course Italy isn't Kentucky, so they had less problems with flat foundations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindal_Railway_Incident
The recent exceptionally wet weather in the UK has triggered at least 4 sinkholes over the last month, the only
casualty being an empty VW Lupo (though the latest will necessitate several houses being demolished...) Its
a taste of Florida without any of the benefits
Not all bad, then if it removes such a blemish from the roads...
Kent university is built on a hill. Under that hill was a tunnel that formed part of the first passenger railway line in the world. Stephen's Rocket Mark II ran on that line.
The tunnel, long since disused, started to collapse taking the CS building with it. The tunnel was quickly filled in and a new CS building erected.
I was very upset by this as it seemed to be the needles destruction of a piece of history. My friends and I had walked through that tunnel as kids. Very dark a spook in there.
They would probably have had to completely line he entire tunnel to keep it from collapsing.
That wouldn't have left all that much of the original architecture in it.
Remember that it those days CS departments had huge mainframe computers, in this case from ICL, and specially build air condition spaces to put them in. That was millions of pounds worth of computer potentially disappearing down a hole!
The tunnel was completely filled. Last time I was there the old redbrick entrances were still in good shape, only inside the arch was a wall of concrete.
Webcam link http://www.corvettemuseum.org/webcam/camera6.shtml