Summer heat waves do a lot of annoying things to daily life, but usually “sending a pickup truck airborne” isn’t one of them. That changed this week in Greenville, Texas, where a stretch of Joe Ramsey Boulevard buckled under brutal temperatures and turned into an accidental ramp. A passing pickup hit the deformed pavement and briefly caught air, all caught on video that’s now making the rounds.
The buckling happened near King Street on the eastbound side of the road, wrote Herald Banner, and it was significant enough that officials closed the section that night while the Texas Department of Transportation dealt with emergency repairs. Local reports described the damage as creating a “ramp-like hazard” for drivers heading toward Wesley Street, which is about as blunt a description as you’re going to get for a road that decided to fold itself upward.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Texas has been baking under a serious heat wave, with a heat advisory posted for the area warning of heat index values up to 110 degrees across portions of North and East Texas. That kind of sustained, oppressive heat is exactly the recipe that causes concrete pavement to expand until it has nowhere left to go but up.
If this feels familiar, it’s because we’ve covered this exact phenomenon before. Buckled roads sending cars airborne, or at least giving them a good jolt, have popped up in viral clips for years now, especially during heat waves out West and across the South. It’s become almost a genre of its own on social media: shaky dashcam footage, a sudden bump in the road, and a vehicle briefly defying gravity before slamming back down.
Why Roads Buckle in Extreme Heat
Concrete pavement is poured in slabs with small joints between them to allow for expansion. Under normal conditions, those joints do their job quietly and nobody thinks twice about them. But when the pavement gets hot enough for long enough, the concrete expands beyond what those joints can handle.
With nowhere else to go, the slabs push against each other and the road buckles upward, sometimes just a bump, sometimes a full-blown ramp like the one in Greenville. Older roads and roads with worn-out expansion joints tend to be the most vulnerable.
Not the First Time We’ve Seen This
We’ve seen similar clips before: heat-warped highways in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, and yes, plenty of spots across Texas, all producing that same startling moment where a car catches air on a road that was flat five minutes earlier. Here’s one all the way over in Greece!
It’s a good reminder that scorching summer temperatures don’t just make the drive uncomfortable, they can actually reshape the road under your tires in a matter of hours.
Our Take
There’s something almost funny about a stretch of Texas highway turning into an impromptu stunt ramp, but the reality is these buckling events can catch drivers completely off guard at highway speeds. Crews clearly moved fast to close the road and get repairs underway, which is the right call.
As for the truck in the video, it looks like everyone walked away fine and got a story out of it. Just maybe not the kind of “getting big air” moment anyone plans for on a Tuesday commute.