Yahoo Autos How Car-Swallowing Sinkholes Form
On February 12th, 2014, a 40-foot-wide sinkhole opened up underneath the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The bizarre geologic event swallowed eight priceless Corvettes, damaging some of them irreparably. It was a totally unexpected disaster with a lengthy rebuilding process. But how to sinkholes actually form?
Civil engineer Grady Hillhouse runs the impressively informative YouTube channel Practical Engineering. Using brilliant, simple visual aids and miniature mechanical examples, he explains how complex civil engineering problems arise, and how modern builders deal with the unpredictable whims of the ground beneath us.
And "unpredictable" applies here. As Hillhouse explains, there's really no way of detecting a sinkhole as it's forming - at least, not until it's progressed to the point where the structures above it go plummeting into the void. And since sinkholes often form due to undetected breaks in our underground water and sewage infrastructure - namely, the pipes we bury beneath our roads - when a sinkhole opens its mouth, it usually ends up swallowing a few cars.
And sometimes, those cars just happen to be Corvettes.
Learn everything you wanted to know about sinkholes right here:
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