A tire just let go at speed. Do these five things.

The first ten seconds

The instinct is to brake. The instinct is wrong. Hard braking on a blown tire shifts weight onto the failed corner and is how a blowout becomes a rollover or a jackknife. Grip the wheel, hold your lane, and keep a little throttle on — power keeps the rig stretched and stable while you steer through the pull.

Once the truck settles, come off the power gradually and start working toward the shoulder. Signal early, move once, and aim for somewhere with real width — a blowout survived on the road can still go badly on a shoulder too narrow to work on.

Steer, drive or trailer — three different events

• Steer tire. The serious one. The truck pulls hard toward the failed side and the front axle is down to one contact patch. Once stopped, that axle does not roll again until the tire is replaced — this is a stop-where-you-are call, never a limp-to-the-next-exit call.
• Drive tire. Duals buy you grace: the surviving tire carries the corner briefly. Grace, not permission — the survivor is now overloaded and heating, and the flailing carcass of its dead partner destroys mudflaps, airlines and wiring while it spins.
• Trailer tire. The most common and the most tempting to ignore. The rig barely pulls, and drivers roll on for miles — while the shredding carcass beats the underside of the trailer apart and throws rubber at every car behind you.

Secure the scene, then look before you call

Hazards on immediately, triangles out if you are on a shoulder — the same discipline as any highway breakdown. Then, from a safe side of the truck, look at what actually happened: which axle, inside or outside dual, and what the flying tread took with it. Check the mudflap, the lights on that corner, and any visible airline.

That inspection changes the call you make. "Blown outside drive tire, passenger side, mudflap gone, lights intact" gets the right service truck with the right tire the first time. "I have a flat" gets you a conversation and a delay.

Roadside tire service or a tow?

Most blowouts are roadside calls: the tire is replaced where the truck sits and the damage the carcass did is patched up enough to move — a light repaired, an airline capped. Roadside tire replacement and the wheel-end work that comes with it is standard mobile service work.

It becomes a tow when the blowout was the start of something bigger: a steer blowout that put the truck somewhere unrecoverable, wheel-end or hub damage beyond a tire swap, or carcass damage to brake lines that makes the combination unsafe to roll. If it is that kind of day, the same phone call covers both — we run the service trucks and the wreckers from the same yard.

Related reading

Semi Broke Down on the Highway? Do These Six Things — If a semi stops on a highway shoulder, get the unit as far right as the pavement allows, put the four-way flashers on, set reflective triangles at roughly 10, 100 and 200 feet behind it, and get yourself behind the guardrail before you make any phone call.

Air Leak on a Semi: Roadside Fix or Tow? — Most air system faults on a semi are roadside-repairable: leaking glad hands, blown air lines, failed brake chambers, stuck slack adjusters and leaking fittings can all be replaced on the shoulder by a mobile service truck.

Truck in Derate or Limp Mode: What It Means, What to Do — A derate is the engine computer deliberately cutting power because an emissions or engine reading is out of range — most often DEF quality or level, a failed regen, or an emissions sensor.