In the United States, the heat, which has not been seen for years, is intensifying, posing serious challenges not only for the human body, but also for infrastructure. like before inform usSan Francisco’s first serious summer heatwave melted train tracks and derailed them. However, this is not the only point in the country where infrastructure has been damaged by the heat.
In several places, the temperature, which rose during the day to 37-38 ° C, caused severe damage to the structure of the highways, wrote the concrete cover of the road surface Vezess.hu. And in the eastern part of Texas, the asphalt itself is beginning to melt Houston Chronicle.
Similar situations can often occur in areas where such heat was not expected before, even in summer. The problem is mainly in the sections of the road where the concrete elements are the main building elements of the surface. It consists of large concrete blocks 4-5 meters long and 3-4 meters wide. As temperatures fluctuate, these large concrete slabs expand in hot weather and contract in cold weather.
All this is calculated in the planning, and if there were no extreme weather, even motorists would not notice it. Now, however, the heat wave is causing a level of expansion that even experts didn’t anticipate. As a result, the lumps are pressed into each other, and since there is no room for further growth, they protrude from their original place.
