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Is Our Infrastructure Ready For Rising Temperatures?
Hugh Pickens writes "Megan Garber writes that last weekend, a US Airways flight taxiing for takeoff from Washington's Reagan National Airport got stuck on the tarmac for three hours because the tarmac had softened from the heat, and the plane had created — and then sunk into — a groove from which it couldn't, at first, be removed. So what makes an asphalt tarmac, the foundation of our mighty air network, turn to sponge? The answer is that our most common airport surface might not be fully suited to its new, excessively heated environment. One of asphalt's main selling points is precisely the fact that, because of its pitchy components, it's not quite solid: It's 'viscoelastic,' which makes it an ideal surface for the airport environment. As a solid, asphalt is sturdy; as a substance that can be made from — and transitioned back to — liquid, it's relatively easy to work with. And, crucially, it makes for runway repair work that is relatively efficient. But those selling points can also be asphalt's Achilles heel. Viscoelasticity means that the asphalt is always capable of liquefying. The problem, for National Airport's tarmac and the passengers who were stuck on it, was that this weekend's 100+-degree temperatures were a little less room temperature-like than they'd normally be, making the asphalt a little less solid that it would normally be. 'As ironic and as funny as the imgur seen round the world is, it may also be a hint at what's in store for us in a future of weirding weather. An aircraft sinking augurs the new challenges we'll face as temperatures keep rising.'"
Lots of bus stops where buses are expected to sit for a while are paved with concrete because of this problem. When it's really hot out, buses sink into asphalt.
Our infrastructure was built 40 years ago and had a 25 year life expectancy. Every day that things dont simply fall apart is a blessing. Since apparently putting people to work rebuilding and improving things would be socialsim, so I guess there's nothing we can do about it.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
This is news to us in Dallas. Our international airport has been fine for many, many days of 105+ temperatures.
Clearly this is a case of poor engineering and substandard materials, not 'hot environment destroying asphalt'.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
Vehicules get stuck in potholes long before asphalt even has a chance to melt
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
The civil engineers around here are replacing any culvert that needs it with the bigger size, so that the increased run-off can be handled without washing out the roads. They assume 500 year events are now 100 year events and 100 year events are 30. 10 year events can happen at any time. Makes sense to me.
Stand back! This weather has the weirding way!
Quick everybody! buy up some carbon credits to stop this from happening!
-]Phreak Out[-
There is a reason that the area around the terminal is made of concrete and there are concrete pads placed at spots where airplanes sit. It is to allow them to stay in one place without sinking. While heat will hasten the effect, a fully loaded large airplane will sink into any tarmac. I ride motorcycles and on hot days my kick stand can dig through most tarmac quite easilly(I carry a small metal plate to spread the load on hot days).
The idea is to keep moving so one does not sink. Whoever let the heavy aircraft sit on tarmac instead of concrete is to blame for the issue and not the heat. Even on an average day for July I bet the aircraft would have sunk to some degree in three hours.
The solution to this problem is to not stand for more than a few minutes on tarmac. If the delay is longer, return to the gate or wait on a piece of concrete.
Damnit, even the worst fearmongers tell us that temperatures will rise by 1 degree per 20 years. Even ignoring the fact that this kind of temperature rise is insignificant in terms of what we're talking about, that's decades or centuries to replace infrastructure.
Instead of worrying about asphalt on streets, I'm worring about brains already having melted in one-too-many climate change activists demonstration.
Get a clue.
"Temperatures will rise by an average of 1 degree" does not imply that temperatures will be ~1 degree higher each and every day. Quite the contrary, climatologists predict that the weather (including temperature) will be MUCH more volatile. That means you will have many days where the temp is >15 degrees above normal, in additional to crazier winter weather etc.
Basically, because the size of weather fluctuations are expected to increase, you will get more days of crazy temperatures that will take a toll on infrastructure.
Sky Harbor (Phoenix airport) doesn't use asphalt runways for precisely this reason: archaeologists would be digging the bones of widebodied aircraft out of the tarpit centuries from now.
FWIW, the record temperature at Sky Harbor was 50C. They had to shut down the airport until it cooled off because the standard tables for flap settings didn't go that high. Now they do.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The reason that they use different mixes depending on climate is that the mixes that set will in a cooler climate, also have some resistance to frost heaving. The mixes that harden at a higher temp are more brittle at freezing temps.
So what's the solution for a place like Indiana that can reach both 0 deg F (-18 deg C) and 100 deg F (38 deg C)?
Yesterday, CDOT closed US-24, about the fourth most important highway in Colorado, due to ice 100 ft. down that melted for the first time (since a railroad tunnel was constructed a century ago) and created a sinkhole.
World temperatures increased by a fraction of a degree but here we go, now airports are melting because of it. What an idiot conclusion telling me a lot of the mental state of the author.
In reality, the aircraft has been in the same spot for far too long. Additionally the consistency of the tarmac material might be sub-standard causing the melting point to be lower. I have seen roads here in New Zealand that had substandard tarmac on them turning to liquid in the hot sun. And New Zealand average temperate is actually dropping over the last decade.
Interestingly enough /. showed those perfectly in the preview, but then escaped them in the final post. /. really should fix their unicode support, I get that use of RTL and control characters were an issue, but there are better ways to prevent that than whitelisting a very small character set.
Not a sentence!
The record high for July 9 and 10 in Washington DC was set in 1936 with 104 degrees on July 9, 1936 and 105 degrees on July 10, 1936. Those are the highest temperatures on record for Washington DC in July (the 7th this year matched the temperature from July 10,1936). The highest temperatures ever recorded in Washington, DC are from two consecutive days in August 1918. The events of this weekend do not represent an unprecedented heat level for Washington, DC. When one further considers that in the last 50 years Washington, DC has been developed in a manner that causes a local heat island effect, this has nothing to do with global warming and everything to do with the expansion of the federal government.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
"And, crucially, it makes for runway repair work that is relatively efficient. "
That's a nice way of saying "cheap", be it on runways or roads.
There's good reason Air Force bases use concrete in the vast majority of cases for runways, ramp, and taxiways.
Got asphalt "problems"? Dig that cheap shit up and recycle it by crushing (makes terrific residential driveways which stay packed but some foliage can penetrate, I've used it for many years) then man up and pour proper concrete instead.
There's no nice way to put it.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Paint it white to decrease it's heat absorption.
Longer term, use a higher temperature mix or switch to concrete like DFW and PHX. Concrete may be less ice tolerant, in which case, a relatively thin layer (~2") asphalt over concrete may be the best option. The concrete provides a solid base and will draw heat off the asphalt, while the asphalt provides an easier to refinish surface that can tolerate snow and ice fairly well.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
this has nothing to do with global warming and everything to do with the expansion of the federal government.
Also, Drudge is reporting that the airplane was discovered to be a closet liberal, faking the whole thing to boost the whole fake AGW thing.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
George Carlin had his own unique view on the 'save the earth' issue. God, I miss that guy! .....g, pale -blue-dot, perspective, plastic “We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me. The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are! We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” Plastic asshole.” George Carlin *** And here's a Youtube link of George... http://www.youtube.com/watch?nomobile=1&v=948Nm34arfA
Translation... If the temperatures go up in an area, its global warming. If the temperatures go down in an area, its global warming. If the temperatures stay the same in an area, its global warming.
In other words, he is saying no matter what happens, weather wise, that is bad it is global warming and would not have happened if you just paid the government money for the CO2 that you create.
Actually, "global warming" just means more heat in the atmosphere and oceans, and more thermal energy means more stuff will happen.
It does *not* mean that every place will be warmer than before by the same amount. If melting ice from Greenland shuts down the Gulf Stream, northwest Europe will suffer horribly - from the cold.
OTOH, a given heat wave doesn't prove global warming any more than a given cold snap disproves it. What matters is the trend in the average... you know, those boring record-keeping and analysis things that scientists have to do.
For an amateur to get a rough idea without having to consult world-wide records collected over centuries, just count how many record daily highs and record daily lows you get over a long time span, like a year, and look at the ratio at the end. Most places - but not all - have been breaking many more record highs than record lows in recent years. And that trend was noticed before the current heat wave began.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Problem is, what you gain at the upper end, you lose at the lower. Australia does indeed get those high temperatures, but the US gets much colder temperatures than Australia does (well, most of it). You need a compound that won't melt in the local summer, but not contract to the point of cracking in the winter.
As someone that has spent large portions of their life in both countries, it is interesting to see the difference in road engineering. Comparing Canberra Australia (temp range roughly -8 C to +40 C) and NE Wisconsin (annual temperature range -30 C to +35 C):
- They seem to use a different blend of asphalt in Australia (doesn't start melting at 35 C, which I have seen in the US, but then again it doesn't have to cope with -30 C either!) It's harder and seems smoother/quieter to drive on than the US asphalt. (Also they use on-road reflectors a lot more than the US - driving at night or in the rain in Australia, it's much easier to see where the lane markings are compared to the US).
- OTOH, they use concrete/cement a LOT more in road surfacing in the US. I can count on three fingers the number of concrete roads I know of around SE Australia (and they are all on major intercity highways, namely, the Federal Highway, portions of the Hume Highway and the F3 to Newcastle). In the US though virtually all highways (US routes and Interstate routes, at least in the Midwest) are concrete, and city streets in the downtown areas usually are too. They don't do this in Australia because it costs so much more than asphalt, but concrete is a lot tougher than asphalt roads and needs less total maintenance over a long period of time (which I suppose is why they used it on a ~few~ busy Australian highways). You do get a continual 'thump, thump, thump' driving around in the US though which you don't get in Australia, due to the expansion joints in the concrete. Annoying but you can't do much about that - they are necessary to deal with the wider temperature swings.
I highly doubt in 25 years the average climate in your region has changes from highs of 80 to highs of 95-99. That would be a cataclysmically drastic climate shift. Even the most alarmist of IPCC scientists is looking at global warming on the scale of 2-3 degrees in 40-50 years. I really wish people would stop blaming hot days on global warming, it just makes us all look stupid. Keep this in mind the next time you have an unseasonably cold day :P
The 2-3 degrees increase is for the average global temperature. The sorts of changes of local seasonal high temperatures have already been seen in the 2003 and 2011 heat waves in Europe.
And while it is difficult to blame particular weather events on climate change it is clear that the last decade of very extreme outlier weather events is attributable to climate change. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22037-climate-change-boosted-odds-of-texas-drought.html
-- QED
The REAL Infrastructure Problems will be preventing the rising seas from inundating Bangladesh, Florida, various Pacific Islands, and the many other low lying parts of our civilization. The real infrastructure problems will be relocating our agriculture once our current breadbaskets begin to fail. The real infrastructure problems will be figuring out how to make our cities capable of withstanding massive flooding and extended droughts, sometimes one right after the other. We've passed the point where we could prevent it, the big challenge now will be surviving it.
-- QED
There are other countries in the world that get hotter than 100F and they have airports. Just throwing it out there. Something tells me there's a solution out there somewhere lol.
The whole civil aviation is doomed to plummet due to oil scarcity.
Soft tarmac will be the least of its problems.