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Life-size Noah’s Ark replica draws tourists in Netherlands

Man builds real-life Noah’s Ark in Netherlands
March 29, 2014, 12:03 AM GMT+10
By Scott Stump
While the ark commanded by Russell Crowe in the upcoming biblical epic "Noah" is a product of special effects, there is an actual life-size ark in the Netherlands that is the product of three years’ work and more than a million dollars.

Following proportions specified in the Bible, Dutchman Johan Huibers built a replica of Noah’s Ark that has welcomed about 3,000 tourists per day since it opened to the public in 2012. The enormous wooden boat in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, houses full-scale plastic animals along with a pair of movie theaters and a restaurant.

Huibers was inspired to build the ark by a nightmare he had in the 1990s in which he dreamed that the Netherlands was overwhelmed by a flood similar to the one in the Book of Genesis. In 2004, he built an ark that was half the size of the specifications from the Bible and then used proceeds from tourists to build a life-size one entirely out of Swedish pine trees. It took three years and cost more than a million dollars.

In the Bible, God commands Noah to build a boat that is 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high in advance of a great flood. Huibers equated a cubit to the average length of a man’s forearm in building his version. Here is "Johan’s Ark" by the numbers:

450 feet: Length of the boat
3 stories: Height of the boat
75 feet: Width of the boat
14,000: Number of trees it took to build the ark
1,500: Number of people the ark can hold
3,000: Number of tourists who visit it per day on average
$11,000: Cost of one life-size plastic elephant replica on the ark
Follow Scott Stump on Twitter and Google Plus

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