A video that went viral this summer showed a vehicle in Cape Girardeau becoming airborne after going over a part of a city street that had buckled in the heat.
Mikhail Chester, an engineering professor at Arizona State University, speaking with NPR’s Juana Summers in June, explained how extreme heat impacts roadways.
“In many ways, we’ve designed our infrastructures over decades if not centuries for temperatures that have been relatively milder,” he said. “So when it comes to a road, we design roads with a particular temperature extreme in mind depending on the particular location where that road is built and maintained, and now, as temperatures are hotter, you’re starting to see the dynamics of those extremes take hold, exceeding the design thresholds of those infrastructures and their particular assets.”…