I don’t know how your Monday’s going, but the ambient temp in my New York office is about 85 Farenheight and the dehumidifier next to me pulled three gallons of water from the air before lunch. This heatwave is hitting a whole lot of America right now. Down in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, roads are buckling so badly that one hurled this hapless Toyota Corolla into the air like a dang Mario Kart power-up. Though I don’t expect the driver was giggling on the other end.
The video below that’s making the rounds is credited to Albert Blackwell, who reportedly had been videoing a bulge in the road when it snapped right in front of a moving car. “When I went back to get a front angle of cars going over the smaller buckle, the road exploded and rose over 18 inches, sending a car airborne,” Blackwell told Local 12.
It doesn’t sound like anyone’s heard from the driver of that current-gen Corolla sedan that gets major air in the clip. It’s absolutely wild how quickly the road pops up to such a steep angle—it could have caught anybody off-guard. Hopefully, they’re OK and get the chance to appreciate this inadvertently epic footage of their car. If it were mine, I would be inspecting the underside of that thing carefully for frame cracks and oil pan damage. But Corollas are tough—maybe it’s OK!
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The city of Cape Girardeau confirmed on its official Facebook page that “Both Broadway and Siemers buckled in this heat wave. Thank you to the crews for managing traffic and the temporary fix on Seimers. We will return to temporary street patches to complete a full repair.” It also issued a warning that more streets might buckle this week as the heat shows no signs of easing up.
Pretty much everything expands and contracts as it heats up and cools down. Most roads are built with this in mind, and there’s some leeway for expansion, but in some situations, like when the heat is just too extreme, that doesn’t cut it. In such a case, the road suddenly is too big for the space it’s occupying. And when that happens, pop, the road can make itself into a jump. I mean, a crack. Just a crack that looked and acted like a jump here.
To capture the exact moment of that happening on video is neat; to have it happen a few feet ahead of a fast-moving car to create an impromptu jump is unreal. Too bad about the mailbox in the way—this Corolla would have a great rallycross audition tape. Too bad about the Earth’s deteriorating environmental conditions, too. It’s going to be a rough week for a lot of us!
Seen any other wild weather-related car calamity? Drop the author a note at andrew.collins@thedrive.com
Automotive journalist since 2013, Andrew primarily coordinates features, sponsored content, and multi-departmental initiatives at The Drive.
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