If you are not sure what we mean with the term “sinkhole Corvettes” then we’d like to welcome you back from the coma you’ve been in the last couple of weeks or the trip into space with the aliens for, umm, probing. Long story short, a section of the floor under the National Corvette Museum collapsed and eight very rare and or essentially irreplaceable Corvettes fell into it, suffering differing levels of damage. It took a couple of days for experts to figure out that the hole seemed stable and that the cars weren’t going to fall to the center of the Earth to be chewed up by dinosaurs. So now what? There have been a couple of “now whats” over the last two weeks but it seems that the picture has finally come into focus and there’s a plan currently being put into action.

One of the ideas that was tossed around but ultimately rejected was installing a glass floor above the hole to let people see the cars in their “natural state” as subterranean dwellers. Due to safety concerns about the hold potentially expanding and swallowing visitors, this idea was shelved. As the cars are housed in a big dome, we were wondering how the museum planned on getting the Corvettes out of their dirty tomb. As it turns out, they will disassemble part of the exterior walls to the display area and use a very large crane to reach in and pull the cars out. We don’t want to be the guy standing above the bottomless pit hooking the cables on the cars are they are lifted. That seems like one false move away from a fall to a place where they’d never see you again. After the cars (as many as they can actually pull out) are extracted, they’ll be shipped to Michigan and restored by GM. We’ve heard word that the restorations will be live streamed which is a cool concept although it will certainly be a long process so make sure you have taken a bathroom break and you have plenty of popcorn once the show starts.

In all seriousness, we’re happy to hear that they’ll fish the cars out. As so many people said on the day of the actual disaster, we don’t consider ourselves Corvette devotees here but we don’t want to see legitimate pieces of automotive history left for dead inside a literal hole in the Earth. Will they get them all out? We hope so but we also would never want to see someone hurt (or worse) to save some lumps of steel, rubber, and fiberglass.

The best news of all is that the museum now has a streaming camera that allows you to follow the action on a day to day basis. You aren’t going to see any crane action for about another week, so far as we have read. The reason is that crews are still testing the ground and stabilizing things so the lifts can be done safely and to make sure that the rest of the area is on solid footing. While it is going to be sad to see crumpled and busted cars pulled from the hole, it will be awesome video and their restorations will be fun to watch as well. As usual, stay tuned here and we’ll keep you posted!

Click here for the live streaming video of Operation Corvette extracton — currently featuring zero extractions