The National Corvette Museum has gone a full 10 months now without a floor on which to stand, since a sinkhole opened up underneath the Skydome floor on February 12th, 2014, and took eight historic Corvette examples (temporarily) to their graves.
So how is the rebuilding process coming along, now that the NCM has committed to refilling the sinkhole? Quite expediently, according to this video update from the Museum. Project Manager Zach Massey of Scott, Murphy & Daniel LLC – the firm that’s navigating the dizzyingly precarious undertaking – says that the firm expects to begin backfilling (or “refilling,” for us non-civil-engineers) the hole as soon as early next week.
Of course, the soft soil and connected caverns underground pose the threat of continued sinkhole expansion, so at present, the team is strategically employing sheet-piling to mitigate the effects of future erosion. That entails laying contoured, interlocking sheets of metal down to retain some of the softer material, and in this case, “to close some of the finer gaps in the sinkhole.”
From the images presented on video, the firm’s efforts seem to be progressing rather impressively. And by the end of the long, expensive process, the National Corvette Museum ought to be on more solid footing than ever before.
Comments
Great Project
I’ve always wondered how you’d go about plugging a sinkhole. We don’t have them around here, but for my own knowledge, its interesting to know how it’s dealt with; architectural approaches that vary geographically.