Posted on 06/07/2011 12:30:26 PM PDT by WOBBLY BOB
St. Paul, Minn. — The Minnesota Department of Transportation is warning motorists to watch out for roads that might buckle without warning.
MnDOT spokesman Kent Barnard said the heat and humidity had caused pavement to heave on some Twin Cities metro highways.
Monday afternoon lanes were closed in I-94 in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Barnard said heat damaged roads in more than 20 places.
Barnard said he has not heard of accidents associated with buckling pavement. But he'd heard reports of damage to cars.
Older concrete highways are more prone to heave up, as debris fills the cracks between the panels, leaving no place for the pavement to expand.
(Excerpt) Read more at minnesota.publicradio.org ...
Slow commute home tonight. The left lane of 77, about a quarter mile south of 35E in AV came up. By the time I got there, they were putting the finishing touches on about an 80 square foot patch of asphalt.
Nope. This happens each and every year here.
What is it, what is different with the pavement used in northern areas? I’d never even heard of a frost heave until I went airborn a short distance in a rental Taurus, no sign, just a lit old-fashioned smudepot on the side of the road. I knew something was up, so it did some good, but whoah, was I ever shocked.
That doesn’t happen here, even up in the high country of NC, some areas of which certainly get as cold as central Connecticut, where that memorable introduction occurred, many years ago.
Same with hot weather. Mid nineties are normal summer temps here, with forays into the low hundreds being noteworthy but not at all odd. No pavement buckling.
About the only thing that does it would be very heavy rain over a period of many days. Even then it’s more subsiding than heaving.
Maybe it’s the soil?
I wasn’t talking about daily temp swings. I was talking about our annual temp swings.
In the winter it get to -25 to -30, every year. In the summer it gets well into the 90’s, every year.
In the winter we have snow and ice. Lots of it. The roads are being plowed and scraped constantly. Untold tons of sand, salt and several chemicals are applied to road surfaces.
Small faults appear in the road surfaces. We have many freeze-thaw cycles during any given winter. As the moisture gets into the cracks and freezes, the cracks get bigger. And bigger with each freeze-thaw cycle.
Until such time that the roads are weakened to the point that a massive heat rise causes so much expansion that the roadway pushes straight up, buckling.
The official investigation into the 35W bridge collapse determined that the original design was flawed. Not lack of maint...
OK... I’ve looked at my atlas and I STILL can’t figure out where the 77, 35E and “AV” might be located. Can you clarify that code? lol
Here in the DFW area in 1980, we had about 52 days in a row of temps over 100; with many around 113-115. Didn’t damage the concrete roadways, but drove me crazy trying to water a 1/2 acre of grass with four sprinklers! Couldn’t water until near sundown because of evaporation and parboiling the foliage, so it kept me up until after midnight moving the sprinklers around.
I believe that Summer was followed by a Winter where the temps were in or near single digits for a couple of weeks. That hard freeze wiped out my pool pump and killed a lot of young shrubs, BUT the extreme temperature differences in only a few months did not cause damage on the roadways that many FReepers have mentioned occurs regularly in the Northern States.
Are the Northern States using asphalt just because it’s cheaper than reinforced concrete; even when they know it is not a suitable compound for the environment?
http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&tab=wl&q=
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2731266/posts?page=44#44
My theory is our road issues are due to the extremes on both ends of the spectrum...throw in heavy use of road salt and that is destruction.
salt eats EVERYTHING and was a contributing factor to the 35W bridge gussets being corroded.
Thank you for the additional comments/explanation. I appreciate it. You folks up there have obviously observed things more closely than I have. Take care.
I believe the reference is to 35E and Cedar Ave in Apple Valley in the southeast area of the metro. This would be south of the Mall of America.
Thanks, jjotto!
BTLD sent a Google map of the US in response to my question, but never clarified what the “AV” in his earlier posting represented.
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