‘Eventually it’s just going to pop’: Highway 402 at Reece’s Corners remains closed

A section of westbound Highway 402 lanes was closed due to unsafe conditions. With more, here’s CTV London’s Bryan Bicknell.

Highway 402 westbound, east of Sarnia, remained closed Thursday, as crews continue to repair a stretch of highway that buckled under extreme heat Wednesday.

U.S. based engineer Ted Teifke was traveling through Ontario Thursday when he passed the work site.

“Back in New York it happens all the time. It starts out as a speed bump, and then it becomes a very impactful situation for traffic,” Teifke explained.

He said it can become very dangerous for drivers.

“If you’re going 70 miles an hour and you hit a speed bump that will definitely shift your gear and throw you off your game, for sure,” Teifke said.

Around 5 p.m. Wednesday, Lambton OPP closed all westbound lanes of the highway between Oil Heritage Road and Mandaumin Road because of what it described as “hazardous road conditions.” Traffic is being detoured onto London Line, which runs parallel with the 402.

It’s the second year in a row this has happened. In June of 2025, highway 402 buckled and expanded under extreme heat along the same stretch. The very next month the same thing happened on highway 402 on the eastbound side.

Lambton County Warden Kevin Marriott says the closure impacts emergency services, and puts undue stress on smaller county and municipal roads.

“Our roads can’t handle that heavy traffic as it is. So, it can create a lot of damage on our roads when we have an event like this. There just isn’t road dollars that there used to be for municipalities,” Marriott said.

He added that he’s attempting to set up a meeting with officials from the Ministry of Transportation in hopes of securing a more permanent fix for the highway.

According to Environment Canada, the temperature Wednesday afternoon was 34 degrees Celsius.

“There’s only so much force the asphalt can resist. Eventually it’s just going to pop up,” said Keith Porter, the Chief Engineer at Western University’s Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction.

Porter says we can expect more events like this as climate change affects infrastructure.

“There is no bad guy, there is no incompetence here. This is just the consequence of global warming. There’s no better material. There’s no magical solution to this. We can just expect stuff like this to happen. And if we don’t want stuff like this to happen, then we have to accelerate our efforts to reach net-zero- eliminate our greenhouse gas emissions,” Porter explained.

In a post to social media Thursday afternoon, the OPP said “there is no estimated reopening time available.”