A heat dome currently occupying the eastern U.S. has brought summer heat earlier than usual this year. We’ve seen extreme heat cause roads to buckle before, and it’s happening again. In this case, everything happened just wrong, and just right, to send a Toyota Corolla flying through the air in a jump that would’ve made the Dukes of Hazzard proud. Even better, it’s all on video.
Albert Blackwell was taking video of a bulge that had formed on Siemers Drive in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. As the Corolla approached, the road suddenly buckled, turning the small bump into an 18-inch-tall crest. The driver had no time to react, going over the ridge at full speed, flying through the air, and landing hard on the other side. As the Balladeer said, “Man, I’ll tell you, the day they passed out good luck, old Bo and Luke must’ve been fishing.”
Traffic behind the Corolla quickly reduced its speed to a crawl, avoiding a similar launch. Damage to the Corolla is unknown, but a different angle of the impromptu jump shows that it conveniently happened right in front of a Toyota dealer. Perhaps they can get the body shop to paint it orange and slap a big 01 on the doors.
What caused this?
Road surfaces expand when they get hot. This is why concrete roads, such as Siemers Drive, are made in sections, with expansion joints between them that give the concrete room to expand in the heat and shrink in the cold. Cape Girardeau has seen particularly high temperatures every day this week, with highs in the 90s and overnight lows only dropping to the 70s. The road surface gets even hotter than this as it bakes in the sun and absorbs even more heat, pushing it beyond the temperatures it was designed to handle. The slabs press up against each other, eliminating the expansion joints. As they continue to expand even further, they buckle upwards since they have nowhere else to go.
Our roads and bridges are in bad shape, and the government seems to prefer building new highways to fixing old ones. It doesn’t help when it threatens to seize infrastructure funding for frivolous reasons, either. Whether people believe it or not, climate change is a thing, and it’s only going to make our roads, among other things, worse.
