Owners Of Noah’s Ark Replica Sue Insurance Company Over Rain Damage
The Ark Encounter is seen July 5, 2016 in Williamstown, Kentucky. The Ark Encounter is a theme park centered around a 510 foot long reproduction of Noah’s Ark. Image by Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images
By Aiden Pink May 28, 2019
The owners of a Kentucky theme park featuring a replica of the biblical Noah’s Ark are suing its insurance company over rain damage to the property, the Deseret News reported Sunday.
Ark Encounter’s main attraction is a 510-foot-tall replica of the ark based on the specifications offered in the Book of Genesis. But the park says that visitors found it difficult to access the ark after heavy rains in 2017 and 2018 caused a landslide that blocked the access road and rendered portions unsafe to drive on. Ark Encounter’s 77-page lawsuit alleges that its five insurance companies refused to cover the $1 million in damages, and is now seeking compensatory and punitive costs.
Ark Encounter stressed that the ark itself was unharmed, the road has since been rebuilt and the park is open for business.
“You got to get to the boat to be on the boat,” a spokeswoman told the Louisville Courier-Journal.
The park, which is run by the same evangelical Christian organization that operates the nearby Creation Museum, attracted controversy before it opened in 2016 because it received public tax incentives during the construction process.
Contact Aiden Pink at pink@forward.com or on Twitter at @aidenpink.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
