We take for granted the roads we use every day. It already takes a beating by the volume of cars that pass through on a daily basis.
"There are over a thousand cars a day that go on this road," Diane Nolte said about the road through her Kingsridge Neighborhood in Plano.
It is not just the stress of cars, but also the relentless force from the scorching sun. One road through the neighborhood buckled from the force of that heat.
"It's one of our summer activities, unfortunately," said Jerry Cosgrove of Plano Public Works.
City crews had to patch the two lane road with asphalt as a temporary fix. Diane remembers driving on it an hour before the road crumbled and said she felt nothing. Later in the day while driving to dinner with a friend she said,
"He said 'Oh my god, there's been an explosion. Someone had taken a jackhammer to your street.'"
It is called "buckling." The heat expands the concrete, and when the concrete has nowhere to go, it goes up. "That's one of the more explosive ones I have seen," said Cosgrove.
Jerry Cosgrove of Public Works says this is the first case in Plano, but it's still early. He says it happens usually by late summer when we've had several consecutive days of high heat.
"That concrete will get hot, it won't cool off all the way overnight and just continually get hotter," said Cosgrove.
One year, Plano had 50 such cases one summer. Let's hope this summer is easier on all of us.