CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. (KTVI) – A video circulating on social media shows a road in Missouri buckling under this weekend’s intense heat, causing a car to briefly go airborne.
The video, taken on Sunday by Albert Blackwell, shows several cars passing over what first appears to be a small bump on the road in the city of Cape Girardeau. Later in the video, the bump has visibly grown. Then, as one car passes on the other side, the road suddenly shifts and buckles just a split second before another car reaches it, sending the vehicle into the air.
“[T]he road exploded and rose over 18 inches,” Blackwell said, in part, in a statement obtained by Storyful.
Roads can crack, buckle, or warp in extreme heat, according to the Missouri Department of Transportation. MoDOT told Nexstar’s KTVI in a former report that this happens when moisture seeps into a crack in the roadway, forcing the crack to grow and expand. The pavement gets to be weaker from the crack, and the heat then causes the road to buckle and warp.
MoDOT says it never truly knows when or where a pavement buckle may occur, but it’s more likely when it’s hot outside.
Much of the country was sweltering under intense heat on Sunday, with temperatures of 90 degrees F or higher estimated to affect roughly 245 million Americans as the heat wave continued into Monday. Almost 10% of the country will feel blistering 100-degree heat on Tuesday, a meteorologist who spoke with the Associated Press predicted.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.