Why would concrete melt, ever? Someone used the wrong words, or didn't understand what they were told.
[Edit] Ok, so they made poor choices in runway materials. O'Hare and other airports near me are all steel reinforced concrete.
[Edit] Ok, so they made poor choices in runway materials. O'Hare and other airports near me are all steel reinforced concrete.
The runway is made from asphalt concrete, in which the bitumen binder starts to melt in the temperatures being experienced.
> Someone used the wrong words, or didn't understand what they were told.
That someone is you.
The components of concrete melt, and they melt not long after steel does. You’d have entirely melted concrete before 2,000 deg C, depending on what’s in it. When rock melts, it becomes a material quite familiar to you. Cement melts sooner, and those are the two main components.
We’re not talking about that, though, as the issue at this airport is squishiness of tarmac.
What are they paving runways with in Luton, anyway?
> Because infrastructure is built in a local context, where materials, designs et cetera are chosen on what is/was normal. I’m genuinely curious: do you really not understand this?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32154999
Seems many people in this thread have trouble understanding that most of the infrastructure we build is built for the people living there under the conditions they normally experience, not for "freak" outliers like this.
Similar to how if there is snow in southern Europe, most infrastructure shuts down while in Russia they run trains through snowstorms. But if it gets tiny bit too hot in Siberia, the trains shut down while in southern Europe they survive no matter how hot it gets.
As others have said, why did Texas have so many problems when it got cold?
Taking our infra, designed for your temps and stating "others should have this too" doesn't make sense.
I live just outside Toronto (Ontario). When you were struggling with a brief cold snap which cost 246 lives because it was -19C, large and heavily populated parts of Canada faced -40C and no one died?
"Texas was not winterized, leaving it vulnerable to extended periods of cold weather, leading to widespread power outages"
why wasn't it winterized?
Because statistics show it was a controlled gamble NOT do to this. UK airport is the same deal.
They could use different (and more expensive) materials, but they gambled it wouldn't be needed, much as why Texas didn't winterize the equipment.
Next, you seem to be completely clueless on aggregate mixes, your mix will be a balance of rock and tar meant to survive a temperature range. Texas mixes will be more aggregate. The problem is this make it less flexible in cold weather and it would degrade far faster. So great you'd design a runway to survive Texas heat that occurs once every few decades versus the cold winters that happen every year.
That was a ridiculous worry, because there are enough random, unmarked road problems that I was nervous just doing the limit sometimes on roads like TX 36, the main highway between Central Texas and Abilene. Even I-35 between Waco and Austin seemed dodgy in spots. Things that would get marked "Straßenschaden" ("road damage") and have dropped speed limits in Germany were completely unmarked. This was in 2004, and the last time I was back (pre-Covid), it wasn't better.
The media coverage of the heatwave has veered between upbeat excitement and scaremongering - but never about the real issue of climate change. Just about a runway with a bit of a chip in it
> The RAF didn’t specify why it suspended flights, but a spokesperson said “the runway has not melted” as early media reports indicated.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/18/london-flights-suspended-aft...