23 ms·

Runway melts at London Luton airport as temperatures in UK near 40°C

257 points by russfink 4y ago

russfink 4y ago
My question - how does the composition of the surface compare with that in other parts of the world that are hotter - Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Australia, the American southwest? Is there some code or regulation that helps these hotter places avoid this problem, and if so, should the UK government adopt them?
- dazc 4y ago
  I'm guessing the composition is dictated by local average conditions. It rains a lot in the UK and freezing ground temperatures are common in the winter too. I lived in Spain for a while and non-average weather such as a day of heavy rainfall can result in disaster movie-style scenarios. It's all relative.
  - brailsafe 4y ago
    I would have guessed local outlier conditions with a bit of padding rather than averages, but I suppose those latent optimizations get progressively more expensive.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Which part of Spain? On the Atlantic Spain, heavy rainfall can just be "Thursday".
    - dazc 4y ago
      Alicante/Valencia mainly but, yeah, I lived in Galicia for a while also. Two different worlds in many ways.
- darksaints 4y ago
  If you use a cold weather composition in hot weather, you get melting asphault like this. If you use a warm weather composition in cold weather, you get cracks and potholes earlier than normal. Your composition is typically defined by climate conditions, not weather extremes.
  - russfink 4y ago
    Thank you - good explanation - the problem, then, is that there is no "one <type> fits all" solution for tarmac. It's just a case of the runway being built for different conditions. In other words, mother nature (global warming) violated the design requirements.
- LightG 4y ago
  There's a similar story happening with our rail lines. The story seems to be that the materials we used in the UK are not stressed to deal with 40 degree heat. They never thought it would be an issue in the UK. Whereas many European railway lines were made to deal with 40-45 degree heat. I'm guessing it's the same for runway tarmac or whatever it is ... Climate change is here ...
  - mhandley 4y ago
    It's not so much the materials - modern rail, especially for high speed trains is laid in long continuously welded sections. The track is pre-tensioned so that at cold temperatures as it tries to shrink it is under significant tension and as it warms it becomes less tensioned. The question is what temperature to tension it to - at some temperature it is no longer under tension and above that it becomes in compression and then you have risk of the rails buckling. If I recall correctly, in England the track is tensioned for 27C (a typical hot summers day temperatures). They could tension for a higher temperature, but then you risk rails cracking in very cold weather. So in the end it's a compromise, but one that was made without expecting the current 40C temperatures.
    - jaclaz 4y ago
      The relevant HN thread, a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32118818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32118818
    - iggldiggl 4y ago
      > at some temperature it is no longer under tension and above that it becomes in compression and then you have risk of the rails buckling. If I recall correctly, in England the track is tensioned for 27C (a typical hot summers day temperatures) While the basic gist is correct, a certain amount of compression is fine, too, because the trackbed can resist a certain amount of sideways buckling force, especially once the track has settled in a bit. It's only when the buckling forces caused by the temperature expansion and resultant compression exceed the sideways resistance of the trackbed that you get buckling. Besides, rail temperatures on a hot summer day in the sun will definitively be higher than 27 °C – that value just happens to be the neutral temperature between maximum allowable compression and maximum allowable tension, whatever those temperatures exactly are.
- wiremine 4y ago
  I've flown through Dubai a few times, and I think most of their flights are early in the morning or at night. I don't know if that's for the runway or for the tires (or just heat in general), but I wonder if those factors played into things in the UK?
  - ycombinete 4y ago
    This definitely isn’t the case, flights go all day at DXB.
  - gruturo 4y ago
    It's for air temperature. Warm air is considerably less dense, which raises the takeoff and landing speed of planes (for a given weight), up to unsafe levels, in addition to requiring a longer runway.
    - mcguire 4y ago
      Mmm, density altitude... (https://www.faasafety.gov/files/gslac/library/documents/2011/Aug/56396/FAA%20P-8740-02%20DensityAltitude%5Bhi-res%5D%20branded.pdf https://www.faasafety.gov/files/gslac/library/documents/2011...)
      - gruturo 4y ago
        Indeed! I didn't want to call altitude into play since it tends not to vary too much between day and night in the same place :)
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      Or requiring weight reductions on the aircraft itself (fewer pax, lower fuel, less cargo).
  - manojlds 4y ago
    And the runway is packed away into a hangar rest of the times?
  - reaperducer 4y ago
- digdugdirk 4y ago
  The article mentioned a section "buckled" - this is the more likely outcome. When designing roads/runways, engineers design for the most likely thermal range. This is then used to determine how much expansion to account for. You'll see this most commonly on bridges, with sections of "teeth" that allow for large expansion/contraction ranges, since the bridge can't expand in the same way a ground road can. In this case, its likely more a matter of runways needing more precision, and therefore the design allowance on the range of extreme temps being much lower. I'm sure a civil engineer could explain better.
  - russfink 4y ago
    Aha, so perhaps the press got it wrong by saying it "melted" - maybe it actually buckled. They might have it confused with common roads that are actually softening and "melting" rather than buckling.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Growing up in a very country part of Texas, the road in front of my house changed over the years as the county would upgrade it. One upgrade in the 80s was a tar base with gravel rocks. During the summer when it would get 100+, the tar would melt and get stuck to everything. It is the primary reason I quit running around barefoot as a kid. I ran along the road with the melted tar, and learned a life lesson. Not only was the hot tar painful, it was extremely unpleasant to remove. Maybe in the 40 years since, people have figured things out like don't pour gravel covered tar roads in the heat?
  - mulmen 4y ago
    Pouring them in the heat is the best time because it's easier to melt the tar.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      I didn't mean the physical act of pouring hot tar when making the road. I meany don't pour as in don't use that material in places where it regularly, almost set a calendar to it, getting hot enough to melt the material.
      - mulmen 4y ago
        I misread your comment and thought you were chasing the road crew and burning yourself on freshly laid tar. After re-reading I see that it was melted by the sun.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    Chip seal is still very common. I suspect that the reason you may have seen it evolve at a particular location is that the usage pattern of the road changed. Everything from gravel to asphalt to tarmac to concrete makes sense depending on what kind (and volume) of traffic a particular road sees.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      This is exactly what happened. When my parents built the house and moved in, there were only a handful of houses. As more houses built and more traffic came from that, the county went through the upgrade process much like in Sims games.
- peapicker 4y ago
  "the American southwest" Here in Denver, at least, our runways are all made of cement instead of tarmac. I knew one of the civil engineers who worked on the special blend of cement the used, and from what I remember of what he told me, it is much thicker than I expected, and has other stuff in it compared even to highway-grade cement to make it more durable. The freeze-thaw cycle is still rough on the cement, in 2007 $11 million of cement slabs had to be replaced due to that. The airport as a whole has 15,000 20-square-foot slabs across its multiple runways. Of course, one could still have buckling with cement if the expansion joints are too close together for the expansion of adjoining slabs over a certain temperature. Perhaps this is what actually happened here?
  - macinjosh 4y ago
    I am from the Denver region and from personal experience I know the area has a lot of Bentonite clays [0] which can expand as water is absorbed and contract as it dries. My neighborhood was built on land with a lot of this clay and our streets are wavy and our driveways are cracked to hell. I imagine they deal with similar issues at DIA. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bentonite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bentonite
    - peapicker 4y ago
      My neighborhood is the same. The ground and site prep out at DIA the Civil Engineer friend told me about took things like that into account. I for one have had much of the cement replaced around my house (some more than once) and when I had the driveway redone, explicitly asked them to mitigate against the clay with whatever they had that made sense. I forget what all they had extra in the proposal that I approved (it was 10+ yrs ago) but my new driveway isn't having any issue while some neighbor's new ones are already cracked again.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    > Here in Denver, at least, our runways are all made of cement instead of tarmac. [...] has other stuff in it compared even to highway-grade cement That's something that looks so different about (some/many?) American roads that I never twigged about until you said that. Roads are tarmac here too, not just runways. For some reason it didn't occur to me reading other comments about hotter places not using tarmac that it'd effect roads for cars too.
- petre 4y ago
  They put more gravel inside the tarmac or use concrete.
- Milner08 4y ago
  Its about building a surface that will also survive the winter and the summer. Its a tricky problem to solve. We could probably replace this with tarmac that could survive much hotter temps, but would just crack and break in the winter when its gets too cold.
  - russfink 4y ago
    Thank you - good explanation. There is no "one <type> fits all," then, for tarmac.
- badcppdev 4y ago
  As well as making concrete runways the best thing the UK government could do is adopt a "war footing" where it comes to climate change. I use the term war footing because the impact of climate change is going to be on the order of a major war. And also because the response required for the decarbonisation required is going to be a significant portion of GDP. Or they could keep their heads in the sand.
  - Synaesthesia 4y ago
    The whole world needs to.
- nonameiguess 4y ago
  American highways use a PG rating system for the bitumen in the asphalt. You can read about it here: https://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/cst/tips/faq_pg.pdf https://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/cst/tips/faq_pg.p.... Short story is yes, places where it is expected to become very hot do use asphalt that doesn't rut under higher temperatures. The only exception I know of it Death Valley, which technically requires PG 76-10, but uses 70-10 just because California deemed it wouldn't be worth it to manufacture the extra grade just for one place that doesn't see much traffic. So I guess the highways just sometimes melt in Death Valley, too. I do recall being a kid going on road trips through these deserts and noticing some of the highways were red and seemed to be made of something different. This was before the switch to the PG rating system. My dad claimed it had something to do with not melting the tire rubber of the vehicles on those roads, but I have no clue what his source was and I can't find any information about these highways, if they even still exist.
xattt 4y ago
Toronto has certainly had 40° days and there were no concerns at the time with the runways melting.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  The roads on the other hand…
- floatrock 4y ago
  Great, sounds like you engineered things for your expected temperature ranges. Story here is a major piece of infrastructure is experiencing temperatures outside of its designed-for temperature range.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Toronto is interesting in that it has to deal with a fairly extreme range of temperatures between summer and winter, in the UK the spread is much more narrow (or at least, it was).
- kennend3 4y ago
  As someone who lives in the GTA... Your post doesn't make sense for two reasons. 1) Toronto airport was built to withstand these temperatures as we have reached them before. Basically it is within the expected design parameters. UK's airport is experiencing temperatures outside its normal range. Building infra is a lot of cost/benefit analysis. Building runways to experience the wide temperature range Toronto faces is very costly. 2) A lot of our infrastructure has been impacted by "extreme heat" as well. How many times has GO transit issued "reduced speed" notifications due to track temperatures?
  - xattt 4y ago
    > UK's airport is experiencing temperatures outside its normal range This certainly seems like a case of infra debt catching up.
    - 4y ago
danbruc 4y ago
Does the title have a typo and it should be as instead of has or is this correct?
- mikro2nd 4y ago
  Either one is correct. Meaning is subtly different, but not much.
  - ALittleLight 4y ago
    "has" is not correct it should be "as". A later sentence in the article is formed similarly and correctly uses "as" - "The runway also 'melted' at the RAF Brize Norton, military air base in Oxfordshire, west of London, on Monday as the UK struggled to cope with the weather."
    - dylan604 4y ago
      But the airport can have temperatures. With some additional punctuation, has could be read more clearly.
      - ALittleLight 4y ago
        Let's say "Runway melts" is X and Y is "temperatures in the UK near 40". "X as Y" says that these two things are happening at the same time. That makes sense. "X has Y" is incoherent. I think this matters because some people on hackernews are not native English users. They may be legitimately confused or misled by typos that a native speaker would unconsciously correct.
  - yongjik 4y ago
    As in, "melted runway at London Luton airport has gained sentience, named itself The Global Warming, and is holding the rest of the UK as hostage with its super-area-heating power; negotiations are ongoing"?
- smcl 4y ago
  The headline is correct as written. There is an abbreviated grammar common in English newspaper headlines (at least in UK and seemingly Australia). "($thing_x occurs) as ($thing_y occurs)" means "$thing_x occurs, because of or related to $thing_y occurring". So you might also see a headline like "Dortmund's title hopes fade as Lewandowski scores hat-trick" => "Dortmund's chances of winning the Bundesliga became narrower, after Bayern won and Robert Lewandowski scored three goals (possibly against Dortmund)" It's something native speakers often don't realise, but there's a lot of really specific stuff for healdines
PaywallBuster 4y ago
Adding alternative links since site is down https://www.cbsnews.com/news/extreme-heat-in-uk-disrupts-air-travel-melts-airport-runway/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/extreme-heat-in-uk-disrupts-air... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jul/18/uk-transport-operators-say-worst-heatwave-problems-yet-to-come?amp https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jul/18/uk-transport...
ibejoeb 4y ago
The runway melts at 40C? Call me skeptical.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Melted presumably doesn't mean "liquified," it means "the heat was sufficient to push the integrity of the runway beyond its safe operating parameters." And it probably wasn't just 40C; it was probably much hotter, since it's black tarmac.
- masklinn 4y ago
  It’s quite believable that the tarmac wouldn’t have been specced for 40C in England. Especially when the airport opened in 1938.
- alias_neo 4y ago
  "Tarmac", the stuff we coat roads on here gets very soft in the summer. When I was a child (90s), my dad lost a finger when we were replacing the alloys on his VW Corrado and the jack sank into the tarmac and collapsed dropping the car, he pulled his arm out just quick enough to _only_ lose a finger. I'll never forget how dismissive my mum was when I said "mum, come quick, dad's cut his finger off, it's on the floor". Fun story aside, the tarmac / road covering we use here do "melt" at relatively low temperatures.
  - madengr 4y ago
  - EGreg 4y ago
    Did they reattach the finger? Does he still have feeling in it and can move it?
    - bregma 4y ago
      Is it still embedded i the tarmac?
    - 4y ago
mirekrusin 4y ago
Spray it with water?
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  flooding the runway would temporarily deal with the heat but also render it unusable for a different reason.
  - skykooler 4y ago
    Why? Airplanes are able to land in the rain.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Cools the runway but can make the local atmosphere more dangerous for humans.
- lm28469 4y ago
  You'd need to design a system and make it pass all sort of tests and specifications. It's not as easy as bringing two firetrucks and spraying for 10 minutes. When mistakes end in potential dead people they don't DIY solutions
- mcguire 4y ago
  Back of the envelope calculation: Yuma International (discussed above) has 540,000m^2 of runways. Assume a depth of 0.1m of cooling, that is 54,000m^3. The density of asphalt is 2322kg/m^3, so we have 310^9kg. The specific heat of asphalt is 900 J/kgK, so that'd be 310^12J to get rid of 1 K degree. The specific heat of water is 4184J/kgC. If I assume the water goes from nearly freezing to nearly boiling and have my algebra right, that's about 6,000,000kg of water or about 6000m^3 of water, all to lower the asphalt by 1 degree. That's about 2.5 standard bulk units of water (Olympic swimming pools). By comparison, 2.5cm of rain on the same runway area is about 13,500m^3 (?) of water. I think it's doable. Anybody got some spare garden hoses? :-)
  - mcguire 4y ago
mikewarot 4y ago
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.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  Not only that, but forget concrete: think asphalt. Having lived in Texas with countless 100+ F days, I can confidently say the asphalt never melted. What are they paving runways with in Luton, anyway?
  - capableweb 4y ago
    > “I can’t believe how those southerners can’t handle 1 below freezing and half an inch of snow, it’s not even that cold”… > 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 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.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Remember that time in Texas all our infrastructure shutdown because it got cold here? 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.
  - badcppdev 4y ago
buildsjets 4y ago
The automated weather broadcast at Yuma airport in Arizona reports the runway temperature. Yuma is a joint civilian/military use airport and some fast jets have a surface temperature limit for their tires. I was there doing some flight test work once and it was reporting 160F, it wasn't even a super hot day.
- collegeburner 4y ago
  yeah lol not surprised. im in texas, not even as hot as arizona, and friends motorcycle kickstands have lowkey melted into ashpalt a few times.
- konschubert 4y ago
  They probably use a different ~~tarmac~~ material composition for the runway.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Luton is all asphalt. The long runway at Yuma is concrete and the shorter ones are part asphalt part concrete. And they likely chose the asphalt formulation appropriately given that they’re in the middle of a desert.
    - squarefoot 4y ago
      I would expect their asphalt being a lot harder and more heat resistant than the one that let my motorcycle fall multiple times in the past years because it melt during summer heat. I clearly wouldn't expect airplanes wheels to "sink" into asphalt like my bike stand, but they need a strong grip when braking during landings which I doubt a much softer surface would offer. Not an expert though, just speculating.
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        A softer surface would give more grip, not less. In fact it would give so much grip that it starts to adhere to the tires.
colechristensen 4y ago
Did it melt or did it buckle because of expansion? Title says "melt" but the only quoted source in the article says "defect".
- lelandfe 4y ago
  Yeah, The Sun isn't a great source. Reuters' title on this is "Flights briefly disrupted at UK's Luton airport as heat damages runway"
  - colordrops 4y ago
    My adblocker is blocking the link got some reason.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    Reuters headline yesterday had the “melted” language.
  - mgdlbp 4y ago
    Huh? The Sun is clearly a great source of radiant heat.
- capableweb 4y ago
  They found a defect, it has not melted. Another source: > 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-after-runway-damaged-during-heat-wave.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/18/london-flights-suspended-aft...
  - debacle 4y ago
    @dang could we have the link updated to a better source?
  - rndgermandude 4y ago
    Yeah, the "melted" might be incorrect, however the quote from the Royal Air Force is about another (military) airport.
photochemsyn 4y ago
They could have planned for upgrading infrastructure to cope with expected warming trends beginning 35 years ago or so, but that would have entailed admitting that the science of atmospheric CO2's effect on climate had essentially been settled since 1980. Send BP and Shell the bill for the infrastructure upgrade, since they spent so much time and effort on science denialism in the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s.
- epistasis 4y ago
  Sadly to this day there are people who have been politicized into disbelieving the science, which has been very clear for a long time. I fear for our ability to deal with the problems of humanity when so much of our politics is easily fooled people fighting ideological wars for the benefit of others.
  - astockwell 4y ago
    Don't Look Up ;)
  - treeman79 4y ago
    - epistasis 4y ago
      What politician is enriching themselves with climate change? Especially compared to all the politicians that enrich themselves via denial?
      - treeman79 4y ago
        Al Gore, John Kerry.
        epistasis 4y ago
        And these politicians putting their money where their mouth is means that you disbelieve the science? When people like Joe Manchin refuse to take climate action, due to his investments in fossil fuels, doesn't that make you think we should take climate action? Why does this sort of reasoning go only one way?
seydor 4y ago
More like runnyway. This is bad engineering
- turbonaut 4y ago
  Failure or going temporarily out of use does not necessarily imply bad engineering. Engineering also has to assess the cost of a solution and weigh this against the risk and impact of any failures. In this case the prior on risk of a ‘melting event’ may have gone up since the runway was designed. The impact of closing for one day in x years may also have been explicitly deemed acceptable.
  - cardiffspaceman 4y ago
    Illustrating that design isn't always 7-sigma availability, There's a shopping mall parking garage near here that is essentially the river bank. When the river runs a high flood, the waters are intended to inundate a lot of parking spaces, to avoid overly-confining those waters. And it's deep enough that some of the parked cars float. Also this parking garage replaced a surface parking lot that was doing the same thing. The second level of the parking garage is not supposed to be inundated, so the garage is a lot taller than it would have been for the same capacity. One can see flood stains on the walls of the first level. The alternative would have been to build levees to confine the waters to a channel, and hope the channel was deep enough.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Right. Just like homes in the southern US would stand up to 36" of snow load without issue.....
  - smcl 4y ago
    Yep and not just homes, power grid, roads ... everything. People joke that the south of England "shuts down" when there's snow, and while there are services that suffer it's never quite like how badly Texas collapsed during their big storm. When there are extreme weather events that you've not planned, designed and built your infrastructure for, you're basically at the mercy of mother nature. In the UK's case that's extremely hot weather, in Texas' case that was extreme cold
fingerlocks 4y ago
Same occurance on the M25 in 2003. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave#United_Kingdom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave#Unit...
AHappyCamper 4y ago
Essential service melts at 40°C..... well, that wasn't designed very well, was it?
- psi75 4y ago
  When these designs were made, 40 °C in the UK was a once-in-5,000-years event. Now, it seems to be about 1 in 30 years (we don't have enough data to be sure). Also, the problem usually isn't the 40-degree air temperature itself, because that's usually in the operating range--it's the rails and machinery and confined spaces hitting 60+ that fucks everything up. New York considered shutting down its subways in July 2011 when it was "only" 40.5. Why? Because the underground stations were hitting 50, which (esp. in New York humidity) is dangerous for the most heat-sensitive people.
  - retrac98 4y ago
    I doubt it's a once every few decades event anymore. It got to 38 in several places in the country a few years ago. It seems to get up to the mid 30s every year now.
  - AHappyCamper 4y ago
    I'm sorry, but that's a whackadoodle approach to engineering. 40C is well within the range of expected temperatures, and the men who designed it failed epically. There have been heatwaves in the UK since 1911 where the temp approaches 40C. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/from-the-archive-blog/2015/jul/01/heatwave-uk-weather-summer-timeline https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/from-the-archive-blog/20...
    - jfax 4y ago
      All of those temperatures are multiple degrees below 40.
- crote 4y ago
  It's one of London's six airports, primarily used for discount holiday flights. Hardly safety-critical. Besides, this is literally the first time ever it has reached temperatures this high - and it has been open for 84 years. I bet they also "failed to design" for hurricanes, cataclysmic floods, and volcanoes!
msrenee 4y ago
Maybe I'm nitpicking, but to say it was nearly 40 Celsius when the recorded temp was 38 C is an exaggeration. When I lived in New Mexico, it would hit 40 C for a couple days at a time in the summer. That sucked. Where I'm at in the Midwest, the temp hits 38 C for a couple of days at a time in the summer. It's a big difference in what kind of precautions you need to take. I realize they don't have the infrastructure to deal with the heat the way we do, but tell me that and then tell me the actual temperature reading. Don't round up 2 degrees C like it doesn't matter.
- timomax2 4y ago
  Typical hot daytime temperature at this time of year is 22 to 25. It could easily be 17 or 18. For us 38 is almost 40.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  It has hit 40 in a bunch of places in the UK today https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62217282.amp https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62217282.amp
  - msrenee 4y ago
    That changes things. I was just going by the article.
- bregma 4y ago
  Be thankful they're giving out a temperature within 10 F of the actual observation. Where I live the TV news has stopped giving out temperature at all and just reports the "feels like" humidex index, a made-up number that makes everyone feel smug about how well they're bearing the load of global warming.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    The humidex is more important for people. 100F with 10% humidity is hot. 100F with 90% humidity is deadly.
  - 4y ago
nodesocket 4y ago
I don’t understand, sure it’s hot for London, but not that hot (100F). Not even close to as hot as it gets frequently in the deserts (Vegas, AZ) and south here in America. Yet, runways are melting and the media is absolutely freaking out. It’s 100 degrees, not that big of a deal.
- montalbano 4y ago
  its about temperature difference relative to geographic norms. this is the hottest recorded temperature in UK history.
- matthewmacleod 4y ago
  It is literally the hottest that the UK has ever been in recorded history. It is roughly the same temperature as the high in Tucson today. It is very hot. You can build infrastructure for this heat. The UK does not have that. This is why runways are melting and the media is freaking out.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - tailspin2019 4y ago
    Also the media don’t generally need much of an excuse to freak out.
  - badcppdev 4y ago
    Sadly there isn't a functioning government in the UK that can freak out and do something about it.
- HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
  It's a big deal because people don't have A/C.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    The runway is outside though. I've never heard of runway melting in the hottest and most humid parts of the US.
Barrera 4y ago
> The runway also “melted” at the RAF Brize Norton, military air base in Oxfordshire, west of London, on Monday as the UK struggled to cope with the weather. That word "melted" seems unjustified. CNBC reports: > 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-after-runway-damaged-during-heat-wave.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/18/london-flights-suspended-aft...
- ibejoeb 4y ago
  Totally unjustified, sensational nonsense. > The UK’s highest of 38.7C was recorded in Cambridge in July 2019. This isn't remarkable. >the record temperature of 100 degrees was reached at Greenwich on August 9 This was in 1911, from: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/115352761/9911357 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/115352761/9911357
  - spread_love 4y ago
    You mean it wasn't liquified?! > "following today’s high temperatures, a surface defect was identified on the runway" https://twitter.com/LDNLutonAirport/status/1549052054936571904 https://twitter.com/LDNLutonAirport/status/15490520549365719... > "high surface temperatures caused a small section to lift" https://twitter.com/LDNLutonAirport/status/1549071379009511425 https://twitter.com/LDNLutonAirport/status/15490713790095114...
  - gnabgib 4y ago
    Are you, perhaps, unaware that these are in different units? 38.7C is 102F. The UK switched in the 60s to centigrade[0]. I'd also be suspicious of the accuracy and method of temperature collection in 1911.. the Met Office didn't start collecting data until 1914, and of the source accuracy.. Wikipedia[1] seems to suggest 98F (36.7C) and in another town. It certainly was extremely hot that August in 1911... especially without modern conveniences. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_King... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_in_the_United_Kingdom
oittaa 4y ago
ITT: Americans not understanding that London is at the same latitude as Calgary, and Houston is located around Kuwait's.
- dang 4y ago
  "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads. Also, please don't post nationalistic flamebait—it leads to nationalistic flamewars, which are the last thing we need here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: it looks like you've been posting quite a few flamewar comments, unfortunately. Can you please not do that? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we end up having to ban such accounts.
  - retard111 4y ago
ibejoeb 4y ago
vegancap 4y ago
Yeah we're not really equipped for this...
- bergenty 4y ago
  I don’t understand this. Do they use different asphalt up there?
  - TT-392 4y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised, there are a lot of different asphalt mixes out there for different scenario. Idk specifically about temperature, but would't be surprised.
hotz 4y ago
- 12ian34 4y ago
  Tell that to the people whose homes have been destroyed. or perhaps all the people that have died in these conditions. It's not typical in the UK. Imagine if you had to emergency evacuate your home for some natural disaster that you'd never have imagined was possible where you live. Would you really be so cavalier? Would you really say this?
- saberience 4y ago
  This is an idiotic comment. As a British person, for most of my lifetime it was a shock to get 30+ temperatures in the UK and if you got multiple 30+ days in a row it was newsworthy. Also, 99.99% of people in the UK don't have fans at home, let alone AC, it simply has never been needed. So yes, a 40 degrees C day in the UK is insane news, especially given it's about a degree and a half hotter than the previous all-time record!
  - techwiz137 4y ago
    You will be seeing 50c very soon, just as we saw 46c and have been seeing 40c for years, I am surprised nobody prepared for this.
- masklinn 4y ago
  It’s the first time since records started that 40C has been reached in the UK. Before today it was quite literally not a thing that happened. The average high temp of a london summer is 24C. This is not a “summer is hot” situation, this is a “country has never planned and is not prepared for” situation.
- secretsatan 4y ago
  Wow, really insightful comment right here, brilliant observation. Do you all get it? The commenter is pointing out how we have seasons in the uk, and they are absolutely unchanged, this is all totally normal in the uk! Brilliant!
12ian34 4y ago
Even more unusual are the grass fires so close to London. Seeing people's homes destroyed is so tragic, particularly as I bet they would never have thought this would be an issue here in the UK. Sky News have some astounding[0] footage[1]: [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NP7GF8xS5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NP7GF8xS5g [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjBV4R18ICY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjBV4R18ICY ...and before the rest of you jump in saying this is regular in your country, please note that it is NOT regular here in the UK. Today, the UK has seen the highest temperature in ITS recorded history.
- russfink 4y ago
  But a lawn fire is not directly temperature related, is it? I suspect the grass has dried from lack of rain, such that some small spark that would ordinarily have fizzled has taken hold.
  - secretsatan 4y ago
    It’s not like it would dry out quicker
  - maigret 4y ago
    The lack of rain comes from the same climate emergency though, this has been confirmed scientifically as well.
    - salt-thrower 4y ago
      Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Weather patterns like droughts are exacerbated by climate change. Heat waves are known to make it easier for fires to catch and spread. Heat waves are more common now due to climate change. Thus climate change makes fires more likely/common. It’s pretty straightforward.
      - maigret 4y ago
        Yeah the jet stream is clearly slowing down because the temperature difference with the arctic is lower than before. But to be honest I don’t care much about my karma here. Thanks for the nice answer in any case
danans 4y ago
I expect that much infrastructure designed for a previous set of worst case scenarios is going to experience failures, especially older and poorly maintained infrastructure. Hopefully many of them can be managed like when the event occurs. However, some of them like seawalls may fail during single catastrophic weather events.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
woofcat 4y ago
Wow if you block cookies on this site it 100% blocks you and kicks you out.
edm0nd 4y ago
I had a local HVAC guy once tell me that the next Elon Musk type is going to be whomever owns the largest HVAC company in the UK and Europe.
- bergenty 4y ago
  We already have mature HVAC companies. They’re just going to expand their operations in Europe.
vivegi 4y ago
I live in the southern part of India and a city by the sea. Summer temps here routinely cross 40°C each year for several days or weeks. There are other parts of India that get 1-1.5°C higher temps. I am surprised by the destruction caused by the high temps and the fires in and around London. What seems to be the driving factor for this apart from the obvious record-setting high temp?
- edanm 4y ago
  Usually, when infrastructure is built without extremes in mind, it won't withstand them. Where I live, it's an annual joke that during the heavy rain of the year, a lot of things break, flooding occurs, etc. That's because heavy rain is relatively rare, so most infrastructure isn't really built to handle the peaks very well. I assume it's the same story.

257 points by russfink 4y ago

My question - how does the composition of the surface compare with that in other parts of the world that are hotter - Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Australia, the American southwest? Is there some code or regulation that helps these hotter places avoid this problem, and if so, should the UK government adopt them?

dazc 4y ago
I'm guessing the composition is dictated by local average conditions. It rains a lot in the UK and freezing ground temperatures are common in the winter too. I lived in Spain for a while and non-average weather such as a day of heavy rainfall can result in disaster movie-style scenarios. It's all relative.
- brailsafe 4y ago
  I would have guessed local outlier conditions with a bit of padding rather than averages, but I suppose those latent optimizations get progressively more expensive.
- anthk 4y ago
  Which part of Spain? On the Atlantic Spain, heavy rainfall can just be "Thursday".
  - dazc 4y ago
    Alicante/Valencia mainly but, yeah, I lived in Galicia for a while also. Two different worlds in many ways.
darksaints 4y ago
If you use a cold weather composition in hot weather, you get melting asphault like this. If you use a warm weather composition in cold weather, you get cracks and potholes earlier than normal. Your composition is typically defined by climate conditions, not weather extremes.
- russfink 4y ago
  Thank you - good explanation - the problem, then, is that there is no "one <type> fits all" solution for tarmac. It's just a case of the runway being built for different conditions. In other words, mother nature (global warming) violated the design requirements.
LightG 4y ago
There's a similar story happening with our rail lines. The story seems to be that the materials we used in the UK are not stressed to deal with 40 degree heat. They never thought it would be an issue in the UK. Whereas many European railway lines were made to deal with 40-45 degree heat. I'm guessing it's the same for runway tarmac or whatever it is ... Climate change is here ...
- mhandley 4y ago
  It's not so much the materials - modern rail, especially for high speed trains is laid in long continuously welded sections. The track is pre-tensioned so that at cold temperatures as it tries to shrink it is under significant tension and as it warms it becomes less tensioned. The question is what temperature to tension it to - at some temperature it is no longer under tension and above that it becomes in compression and then you have risk of the rails buckling. If I recall correctly, in England the track is tensioned for 27C (a typical hot summers day temperatures). They could tension for a higher temperature, but then you risk rails cracking in very cold weather. So in the end it's a compromise, but one that was made without expecting the current 40C temperatures.
  - jaclaz 4y ago
    The relevant HN thread, a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32118818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32118818
  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    > at some temperature it is no longer under tension and above that it becomes in compression and then you have risk of the rails buckling. If I recall correctly, in England the track is tensioned for 27C (a typical hot summers day temperatures) While the basic gist is correct, a certain amount of compression is fine, too, because the trackbed can resist a certain amount of sideways buckling force, especially once the track has settled in a bit. It's only when the buckling forces caused by the temperature expansion and resultant compression exceed the sideways resistance of the trackbed that you get buckling. Besides, rail temperatures on a hot summer day in the sun will definitively be higher than 27 °C – that value just happens to be the neutral temperature between maximum allowable compression and maximum allowable tension, whatever those temperatures exactly are.
wiremine 4y ago
I've flown through Dubai a few times, and I think most of their flights are early in the morning or at night. I don't know if that's for the runway or for the tires (or just heat in general), but I wonder if those factors played into things in the UK?
- ycombinete 4y ago
  This definitely isn’t the case, flights go all day at DXB.
- gruturo 4y ago
  It's for air temperature. Warm air is considerably less dense, which raises the takeoff and landing speed of planes (for a given weight), up to unsafe levels, in addition to requiring a longer runway.
  - mcguire 4y ago
    Mmm, density altitude... (https://www.faasafety.gov/files/gslac/library/documents/2011/Aug/56396/FAA%20P-8740-02%20DensityAltitude%5Bhi-res%5D%20branded.pdf https://www.faasafety.gov/files/gslac/library/documents/2011...)
    - gruturo 4y ago
      Indeed! I didn't want to call altitude into play since it tends not to vary too much between day and night in the same place :)
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    Or requiring weight reductions on the aircraft itself (fewer pax, lower fuel, less cargo).
- manojlds 4y ago
  And the runway is packed away into a hangar rest of the times?
- reaperducer 4y ago
digdugdirk 4y ago
The article mentioned a section "buckled" - this is the more likely outcome. When designing roads/runways, engineers design for the most likely thermal range. This is then used to determine how much expansion to account for. You'll see this most commonly on bridges, with sections of "teeth" that allow for large expansion/contraction ranges, since the bridge can't expand in the same way a ground road can. In this case, its likely more a matter of runways needing more precision, and therefore the design allowance on the range of extreme temps being much lower. I'm sure a civil engineer could explain better.
- russfink 4y ago
  Aha, so perhaps the press got it wrong by saying it "melted" - maybe it actually buckled. They might have it confused with common roads that are actually softening and "melting" rather than buckling.
dylan604 4y ago
Growing up in a very country part of Texas, the road in front of my house changed over the years as the county would upgrade it. One upgrade in the 80s was a tar base with gravel rocks. During the summer when it would get 100+, the tar would melt and get stuck to everything. It is the primary reason I quit running around barefoot as a kid. I ran along the road with the melted tar, and learned a life lesson. Not only was the hot tar painful, it was extremely unpleasant to remove. Maybe in the 40 years since, people have figured things out like don't pour gravel covered tar roads in the heat?
- mulmen 4y ago
  Pouring them in the heat is the best time because it's easier to melt the tar.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    I didn't mean the physical act of pouring hot tar when making the road. I meany don't pour as in don't use that material in places where it regularly, almost set a calendar to it, getting hot enough to melt the material.
    - mulmen 4y ago
      I misread your comment and thought you were chasing the road crew and burning yourself on freshly laid tar. After re-reading I see that it was melted by the sun.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Chip seal is still very common. I suspect that the reason you may have seen it evolve at a particular location is that the usage pattern of the road changed. Everything from gravel to asphalt to tarmac to concrete makes sense depending on what kind (and volume) of traffic a particular road sees.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    This is exactly what happened. When my parents built the house and moved in, there were only a handful of houses. As more houses built and more traffic came from that, the county went through the upgrade process much like in Sims games.
peapicker 4y ago
"the American southwest" Here in Denver, at least, our runways are all made of cement instead of tarmac. I knew one of the civil engineers who worked on the special blend of cement the used, and from what I remember of what he told me, it is much thicker than I expected, and has other stuff in it compared even to highway-grade cement to make it more durable. The freeze-thaw cycle is still rough on the cement, in 2007 $11 million of cement slabs had to be replaced due to that. The airport as a whole has 15,000 20-square-foot slabs across its multiple runways. Of course, one could still have buckling with cement if the expansion joints are too close together for the expansion of adjoining slabs over a certain temperature. Perhaps this is what actually happened here?
- macinjosh 4y ago
  I am from the Denver region and from personal experience I know the area has a lot of Bentonite clays [0] which can expand as water is absorbed and contract as it dries. My neighborhood was built on land with a lot of this clay and our streets are wavy and our driveways are cracked to hell. I imagine they deal with similar issues at DIA. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bentonite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bentonite
  - peapicker 4y ago
    My neighborhood is the same. The ground and site prep out at DIA the Civil Engineer friend told me about took things like that into account. I for one have had much of the cement replaced around my house (some more than once) and when I had the driveway redone, explicitly asked them to mitigate against the clay with whatever they had that made sense. I forget what all they had extra in the proposal that I approved (it was 10+ yrs ago) but my new driveway isn't having any issue while some neighbor's new ones are already cracked again.
- OJFord 4y ago
  > Here in Denver, at least, our runways are all made of cement instead of tarmac. [...] has other stuff in it compared even to highway-grade cement That's something that looks so different about (some/many?) American roads that I never twigged about until you said that. Roads are tarmac here too, not just runways. For some reason it didn't occur to me reading other comments about hotter places not using tarmac that it'd effect roads for cars too.
petre 4y ago
They put more gravel inside the tarmac or use concrete.
Milner08 4y ago
Its about building a surface that will also survive the winter and the summer. Its a tricky problem to solve. We could probably replace this with tarmac that could survive much hotter temps, but would just crack and break in the winter when its gets too cold.
- russfink 4y ago
  Thank you - good explanation. There is no "one <type> fits all," then, for tarmac.
badcppdev 4y ago
As well as making concrete runways the best thing the UK government could do is adopt a "war footing" where it comes to climate change. I use the term war footing because the impact of climate change is going to be on the order of a major war. And also because the response required for the decarbonisation required is going to be a significant portion of GDP. Or they could keep their heads in the sand.
- Synaesthesia 4y ago
  The whole world needs to.
nonameiguess 4y ago
American highways use a PG rating system for the bitumen in the asphalt. You can read about it here: https://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/cst/tips/faq_pg.pdf https://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/cst/tips/faq_pg.p.... Short story is yes, places where it is expected to become very hot do use asphalt that doesn't rut under higher temperatures. The only exception I know of it Death Valley, which technically requires PG 76-10, but uses 70-10 just because California deemed it wouldn't be worth it to manufacture the extra grade just for one place that doesn't see much traffic. So I guess the highways just sometimes melt in Death Valley, too. I do recall being a kid going on road trips through these deserts and noticing some of the highways were red and seemed to be made of something different. This was before the switch to the PG rating system. My dad claimed it had something to do with not melting the tire rubber of the vehicles on those roads, but I have no clue what his source was and I can't find any information about these highways, if they even still exist.

xattt 4y ago

Toronto has certainly had 40° days and there were no concerns at the time with the runways melting.

Scoundreller 4y ago
The roads on the other hand…
floatrock 4y ago
Great, sounds like you engineered things for your expected temperature ranges. Story here is a major piece of infrastructure is experiencing temperatures outside of its designed-for temperature range.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Toronto is interesting in that it has to deal with a fairly extreme range of temperatures between summer and winter, in the UK the spread is much more narrow (or at least, it was).
kennend3 4y ago
As someone who lives in the GTA... Your post doesn't make sense for two reasons. 1) Toronto airport was built to withstand these temperatures as we have reached them before. Basically it is within the expected design parameters. UK's airport is experiencing temperatures outside its normal range. Building infra is a lot of cost/benefit analysis. Building runways to experience the wide temperature range Toronto faces is very costly. 2) A lot of our infrastructure has been impacted by "extreme heat" as well. How many times has GO transit issued "reduced speed" notifications due to track temperatures?
- xattt 4y ago
  > UK's airport is experiencing temperatures outside its normal range This certainly seems like a case of infra debt catching up.
  - 4y ago

danbruc 4y ago

Does the title have a typo and it should be as instead of has or is this correct?

mikro2nd 4y ago
Either one is correct. Meaning is subtly different, but not much.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  "has" is not correct it should be "as". A later sentence in the article is formed similarly and correctly uses "as" - "The runway also 'melted' at the RAF Brize Norton, military air base in Oxfordshire, west of London, on Monday as the UK struggled to cope with the weather."
  - dylan604 4y ago
    But the airport can have temperatures. With some additional punctuation, has could be read more clearly.
    - ALittleLight 4y ago
      Let's say "Runway melts" is X and Y is "temperatures in the UK near 40". "X as Y" says that these two things are happening at the same time. That makes sense. "X has Y" is incoherent. I think this matters because some people on hackernews are not native English users. They may be legitimately confused or misled by typos that a native speaker would unconsciously correct.
- yongjik 4y ago
  As in, "melted runway at London Luton airport has gained sentience, named itself The Global Warming, and is holding the rest of the UK as hostage with its super-area-heating power; negotiations are ongoing"?
smcl 4y ago
The headline is correct as written. There is an abbreviated grammar common in English newspaper headlines (at least in UK and seemingly Australia). "($thing_x occurs) as ($thing_y occurs)" means "$thing_x occurs, because of or related to $thing_y occurring". So you might also see a headline like "Dortmund's title hopes fade as Lewandowski scores hat-trick" => "Dortmund's chances of winning the Bundesliga became narrower, after Bayern won and Robert Lewandowski scored three goals (possibly against Dortmund)" It's something native speakers often don't realise, but there's a lot of really specific stuff for healdines

PaywallBuster 4y ago

Adding alternative links since site is down https://www.cbsnews.com/news/extreme-heat-in-uk-disrupts-air-travel-melts-airport-runway/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/extreme-heat-in-uk-disrupts-air... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jul/18/uk-transport-operators-say-worst-heatwave-problems-yet-to-come?amp https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jul/18/uk-transport...

ibejoeb 4y ago

The runway melts at 40C? Call me skeptical.

woodruffw 4y ago
Melted presumably doesn't mean "liquified," it means "the heat was sufficient to push the integrity of the runway beyond its safe operating parameters." And it probably wasn't just 40C; it was probably much hotter, since it's black tarmac.
masklinn 4y ago
It’s quite believable that the tarmac wouldn’t have been specced for 40C in England. Especially when the airport opened in 1938.
alias_neo 4y ago
"Tarmac", the stuff we coat roads on here gets very soft in the summer. When I was a child (90s), my dad lost a finger when we were replacing the alloys on his VW Corrado and the jack sank into the tarmac and collapsed dropping the car, he pulled his arm out just quick enough to _only_ lose a finger. I'll never forget how dismissive my mum was when I said "mum, come quick, dad's cut his finger off, it's on the floor". Fun story aside, the tarmac / road covering we use here do "melt" at relatively low temperatures.
- madengr 4y ago
- EGreg 4y ago
  Did they reattach the finger? Does he still have feeling in it and can move it?
  - bregma 4y ago
    Is it still embedded i the tarmac?
  - 4y ago

mirekrusin 4y ago

Spray it with water?

dragonwriter 4y ago
flooding the runway would temporarily deal with the heat but also render it unusable for a different reason.
- skykooler 4y ago
  Why? Airplanes are able to land in the rain.
pixl97 4y ago
Cools the runway but can make the local atmosphere more dangerous for humans.
lm28469 4y ago
You'd need to design a system and make it pass all sort of tests and specifications. It's not as easy as bringing two firetrucks and spraying for 10 minutes. When mistakes end in potential dead people they don't DIY solutions
mcguire 4y ago
Back of the envelope calculation: Yuma International (discussed above) has 540,000m^2 of runways. Assume a depth of 0.1m of cooling, that is 54,000m^3. The density of asphalt is 2322kg/m^3, so we have 310^9kg. The specific heat of asphalt is 900 J/kgK, so that'd be 310^12J to get rid of 1 K degree. The specific heat of water is 4184J/kgC. If I assume the water goes from nearly freezing to nearly boiling and have my algebra right, that's about 6,000,000kg of water or about 6000m^3 of water, all to lower the asphalt by 1 degree. That's about 2.5 standard bulk units of water (Olympic swimming pools). By comparison, 2.5cm of rain on the same runway area is about 13,500m^3 (?) of water. I think it's doable. Anybody got some spare garden hoses? :-)
- mcguire 4y ago

mikewarot 4y ago

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.

nathanaldensr 4y ago
Not only that, but forget concrete: think asphalt. Having lived in Texas with countless 100+ F days, I can confidently say the asphalt never melted. What are they paving runways with in Luton, anyway?
- capableweb 4y ago
  > “I can’t believe how those southerners can’t handle 1 below freezing and half an inch of snow, it’s not even that cold”… > 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 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.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Remember that time in Texas all our infrastructure shutdown because it got cold here? 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.
- badcppdev 4y ago

buildsjets 4y ago

The automated weather broadcast at Yuma airport in Arizona reports the runway temperature. Yuma is a joint civilian/military use airport and some fast jets have a surface temperature limit for their tires. I was there doing some flight test work once and it was reporting 160F, it wasn't even a super hot day.

collegeburner 4y ago
yeah lol not surprised. im in texas, not even as hot as arizona, and friends motorcycle kickstands have lowkey melted into ashpalt a few times.
konschubert 4y ago
They probably use a different ~~tarmac~~ material composition for the runway.
- kube-system 4y ago
  Luton is all asphalt. The long runway at Yuma is concrete and the shorter ones are part asphalt part concrete. And they likely chose the asphalt formulation appropriately given that they’re in the middle of a desert.
  - squarefoot 4y ago
    I would expect their asphalt being a lot harder and more heat resistant than the one that let my motorcycle fall multiple times in the past years because it melt during summer heat. I clearly wouldn't expect airplanes wheels to "sink" into asphalt like my bike stand, but they need a strong grip when braking during landings which I doubt a much softer surface would offer. Not an expert though, just speculating.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      A softer surface would give more grip, not less. In fact it would give so much grip that it starts to adhere to the tires.

colechristensen 4y ago

Did it melt or did it buckle because of expansion? Title says "melt" but the only quoted source in the article says "defect".

lelandfe 4y ago
Yeah, The Sun isn't a great source. Reuters' title on this is "Flights briefly disrupted at UK's Luton airport as heat damages runway"
- colordrops 4y ago
  My adblocker is blocking the link got some reason.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  Reuters headline yesterday had the “melted” language.
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  Huh? The Sun is clearly a great source of radiant heat.
capableweb 4y ago
They found a defect, it has not melted. Another source: > 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-after-runway-damaged-during-heat-wave.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/18/london-flights-suspended-aft...
- debacle 4y ago
  @dang could we have the link updated to a better source?
- rndgermandude 4y ago
  Yeah, the "melted" might be incorrect, however the quote from the Royal Air Force is about another (military) airport.

photochemsyn 4y ago

They could have planned for upgrading infrastructure to cope with expected warming trends beginning 35 years ago or so, but that would have entailed admitting that the science of atmospheric CO2's effect on climate had essentially been settled since 1980. Send BP and Shell the bill for the infrastructure upgrade, since they spent so much time and effort on science denialism in the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s.

epistasis 4y ago
Sadly to this day there are people who have been politicized into disbelieving the science, which has been very clear for a long time. I fear for our ability to deal with the problems of humanity when so much of our politics is easily fooled people fighting ideological wars for the benefit of others.
- astockwell 4y ago
  Don't Look Up ;)
- treeman79 4y ago
  - epistasis 4y ago
    What politician is enriching themselves with climate change? Especially compared to all the politicians that enrich themselves via denial?
    - treeman79 4y ago
      Al Gore, John Kerry.
      - epistasis 4y ago
        And these politicians putting their money where their mouth is means that you disbelieve the science? When people like Joe Manchin refuse to take climate action, due to his investments in fossil fuels, doesn't that make you think we should take climate action? Why does this sort of reasoning go only one way?

seydor 4y ago

More like runnyway. This is bad engineering

turbonaut 4y ago
Failure or going temporarily out of use does not necessarily imply bad engineering. Engineering also has to assess the cost of a solution and weigh this against the risk and impact of any failures. In this case the prior on risk of a ‘melting event’ may have gone up since the runway was designed. The impact of closing for one day in x years may also have been explicitly deemed acceptable.
- cardiffspaceman 4y ago
  Illustrating that design isn't always 7-sigma availability, There's a shopping mall parking garage near here that is essentially the river bank. When the river runs a high flood, the waters are intended to inundate a lot of parking spaces, to avoid overly-confining those waters. And it's deep enough that some of the parked cars float. Also this parking garage replaced a surface parking lot that was doing the same thing. The second level of the parking garage is not supposed to be inundated, so the garage is a lot taller than it would have been for the same capacity. One can see flood stains on the walls of the first level. The alternative would have been to build levees to confine the waters to a channel, and hope the channel was deep enough.
pixl97 4y ago
Right. Just like homes in the southern US would stand up to 36" of snow load without issue.....
- smcl 4y ago
  Yep and not just homes, power grid, roads ... everything. People joke that the south of England "shuts down" when there's snow, and while there are services that suffer it's never quite like how badly Texas collapsed during their big storm. When there are extreme weather events that you've not planned, designed and built your infrastructure for, you're basically at the mercy of mother nature. In the UK's case that's extremely hot weather, in Texas' case that was extreme cold

fingerlocks 4y ago

Same occurance on the M25 in 2003. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave#United_Kingdom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave#Unit...

AHappyCamper 4y ago

Essential service melts at 40°C..... well, that wasn't designed very well, was it?

psi75 4y ago
When these designs were made, 40 °C in the UK was a once-in-5,000-years event. Now, it seems to be about 1 in 30 years (we don't have enough data to be sure). Also, the problem usually isn't the 40-degree air temperature itself, because that's usually in the operating range--it's the rails and machinery and confined spaces hitting 60+ that fucks everything up. New York considered shutting down its subways in July 2011 when it was "only" 40.5. Why? Because the underground stations were hitting 50, which (esp. in New York humidity) is dangerous for the most heat-sensitive people.
- retrac98 4y ago
  I doubt it's a once every few decades event anymore. It got to 38 in several places in the country a few years ago. It seems to get up to the mid 30s every year now.
- AHappyCamper 4y ago
  I'm sorry, but that's a whackadoodle approach to engineering. 40C is well within the range of expected temperatures, and the men who designed it failed epically. There have been heatwaves in the UK since 1911 where the temp approaches 40C. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/from-the-archive-blog/2015/jul/01/heatwave-uk-weather-summer-timeline https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/from-the-archive-blog/20...
  - jfax 4y ago
    All of those temperatures are multiple degrees below 40.
crote 4y ago
It's one of London's six airports, primarily used for discount holiday flights. Hardly safety-critical. Besides, this is literally the first time ever it has reached temperatures this high - and it has been open for 84 years. I bet they also "failed to design" for hurricanes, cataclysmic floods, and volcanoes!

msrenee 4y ago

Maybe I'm nitpicking, but to say it was nearly 40 Celsius when the recorded temp was 38 C is an exaggeration. When I lived in New Mexico, it would hit 40 C for a couple days at a time in the summer. That sucked. Where I'm at in the Midwest, the temp hits 38 C for a couple of days at a time in the summer. It's a big difference in what kind of precautions you need to take. I realize they don't have the infrastructure to deal with the heat the way we do, but tell me that and then tell me the actual temperature reading. Don't round up 2 degrees C like it doesn't matter.

timomax2 4y ago
Typical hot daytime temperature at this time of year is 22 to 25. It could easily be 17 or 18. For us 38 is almost 40.
nicoburns 4y ago
It has hit 40 in a bunch of places in the UK today https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62217282.amp https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62217282.amp
- msrenee 4y ago
  That changes things. I was just going by the article.
bregma 4y ago
Be thankful they're giving out a temperature within 10 F of the actual observation. Where I live the TV news has stopped giving out temperature at all and just reports the "feels like" humidex index, a made-up number that makes everyone feel smug about how well they're bearing the load of global warming.
- pixl97 4y ago
  The humidex is more important for people. 100F with 10% humidity is hot. 100F with 90% humidity is deadly.
- 4y ago

nodesocket 4y ago

I don’t understand, sure it’s hot for London, but not that hot (100F). Not even close to as hot as it gets frequently in the deserts (Vegas, AZ) and south here in America. Yet, runways are melting and the media is absolutely freaking out. It’s 100 degrees, not that big of a deal.

montalbano 4y ago
its about temperature difference relative to geographic norms. this is the hottest recorded temperature in UK history.
matthewmacleod 4y ago
It is literally the hottest that the UK has ever been in recorded history. It is roughly the same temperature as the high in Tucson today. It is very hot. You can build infrastructure for this heat. The UK does not have that. This is why runways are melting and the media is freaking out.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tailspin2019 4y ago
  Also the media don’t generally need much of an excuse to freak out.
- badcppdev 4y ago
  Sadly there isn't a functioning government in the UK that can freak out and do something about it.
HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
It's a big deal because people don't have A/C.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  The runway is outside though. I've never heard of runway melting in the hottest and most humid parts of the US.

Barrera 4y ago

> The runway also “melted” at the RAF Brize Norton, military air base in Oxfordshire, west of London, on Monday as the UK struggled to cope with the weather. That word "melted" seems unjustified. CNBC reports: > 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-after-runway-damaged-during-heat-wave.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/18/london-flights-suspended-aft...

ibejoeb 4y ago
Totally unjustified, sensational nonsense. > The UK’s highest of 38.7C was recorded in Cambridge in July 2019. This isn't remarkable. >the record temperature of 100 degrees was reached at Greenwich on August 9 This was in 1911, from: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/115352761/9911357 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/115352761/9911357
- spread_love 4y ago
  You mean it wasn't liquified?! > "following today’s high temperatures, a surface defect was identified on the runway" https://twitter.com/LDNLutonAirport/status/1549052054936571904 https://twitter.com/LDNLutonAirport/status/15490520549365719... > "high surface temperatures caused a small section to lift" https://twitter.com/LDNLutonAirport/status/1549071379009511425 https://twitter.com/LDNLutonAirport/status/15490713790095114...
- gnabgib 4y ago
  Are you, perhaps, unaware that these are in different units? 38.7C is 102F. The UK switched in the 60s to centigrade[0]. I'd also be suspicious of the accuracy and method of temperature collection in 1911.. the Met Office didn't start collecting data until 1914, and of the source accuracy.. Wikipedia[1] seems to suggest 98F (36.7C) and in another town. It certainly was extremely hot that August in 1911... especially without modern conveniences. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_King... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_in_the_United_Kingdom

oittaa 4y ago

ITT: Americans not understanding that London is at the same latitude as Calgary, and Houston is located around Kuwait's.

dang 4y ago
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads. Also, please don't post nationalistic flamebait—it leads to nationalistic flamewars, which are the last thing we need here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: it looks like you've been posting quite a few flamewar comments, unfortunately. Can you please not do that? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we end up having to ban such accounts.
- retard111 4y ago

ibejoeb 4y ago

vegancap 4y ago

Yeah we're not really equipped for this...

bergenty 4y ago
I don’t understand this. Do they use different asphalt up there?
- TT-392 4y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised, there are a lot of different asphalt mixes out there for different scenario. Idk specifically about temperature, but would't be surprised.

hotz 4y ago

12ian34 4y ago
Tell that to the people whose homes have been destroyed. or perhaps all the people that have died in these conditions. It's not typical in the UK. Imagine if you had to emergency evacuate your home for some natural disaster that you'd never have imagined was possible where you live. Would you really be so cavalier? Would you really say this?
saberience 4y ago
This is an idiotic comment. As a British person, for most of my lifetime it was a shock to get 30+ temperatures in the UK and if you got multiple 30+ days in a row it was newsworthy. Also, 99.99% of people in the UK don't have fans at home, let alone AC, it simply has never been needed. So yes, a 40 degrees C day in the UK is insane news, especially given it's about a degree and a half hotter than the previous all-time record!
- techwiz137 4y ago
  You will be seeing 50c very soon, just as we saw 46c and have been seeing 40c for years, I am surprised nobody prepared for this.
masklinn 4y ago
It’s the first time since records started that 40C has been reached in the UK. Before today it was quite literally not a thing that happened. The average high temp of a london summer is 24C. This is not a “summer is hot” situation, this is a “country has never planned and is not prepared for” situation.
secretsatan 4y ago
Wow, really insightful comment right here, brilliant observation. Do you all get it? The commenter is pointing out how we have seasons in the uk, and they are absolutely unchanged, this is all totally normal in the uk! Brilliant!

12ian34 4y ago

Even more unusual are the grass fires so close to London. Seeing people's homes destroyed is so tragic, particularly as I bet they would never have thought this would be an issue here in the UK. Sky News have some astounding[0] footage[1]: [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NP7GF8xS5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NP7GF8xS5g [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjBV4R18ICY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjBV4R18ICY ...and before the rest of you jump in saying this is regular in your country, please note that it is NOT regular here in the UK. Today, the UK has seen the highest temperature in ITS recorded history.

russfink 4y ago
But a lawn fire is not directly temperature related, is it? I suspect the grass has dried from lack of rain, such that some small spark that would ordinarily have fizzled has taken hold.
- secretsatan 4y ago
  It’s not like it would dry out quicker
- maigret 4y ago
  The lack of rain comes from the same climate emergency though, this has been confirmed scientifically as well.
  - salt-thrower 4y ago
    Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Weather patterns like droughts are exacerbated by climate change. Heat waves are known to make it easier for fires to catch and spread. Heat waves are more common now due to climate change. Thus climate change makes fires more likely/common. It’s pretty straightforward.
    - maigret 4y ago
      Yeah the jet stream is clearly slowing down because the temperature difference with the arctic is lower than before. But to be honest I don’t care much about my karma here. Thanks for the nice answer in any case

danans 4y ago

I expect that much infrastructure designed for a previous set of worst case scenarios is going to experience failures, especially older and poorly maintained infrastructure. Hopefully many of them can be managed like when the event occurs. However, some of them like seawalls may fail during single catastrophic weather events.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

woofcat 4y ago

Wow if you block cookies on this site it 100% blocks you and kicks you out.

edm0nd 4y ago

I had a local HVAC guy once tell me that the next Elon Musk type is going to be whomever owns the largest HVAC company in the UK and Europe.

bergenty 4y ago
We already have mature HVAC companies. They’re just going to expand their operations in Europe.

vivegi 4y ago

I live in the southern part of India and a city by the sea. Summer temps here routinely cross 40°C each year for several days or weeks. There are other parts of India that get 1-1.5°C higher temps. I am surprised by the destruction caused by the high temps and the fires in and around London. What seems to be the driving factor for this apart from the obvious record-setting high temp?

edanm 4y ago
Usually, when infrastructure is built without extremes in mind, it won't withstand them. Where I live, it's an annual joke that during the heavy rain of the year, a lot of things break, flooding occurs, etc. That's because heavy rain is relatively rare, so most infrastructure isn't really built to handle the peaks very well. I assume it's the same story.