Good grief. The Met Office has issued its first extreme heat warning. Take care in the Sun people. Heat stroke is no joke.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/uk-heatwave-searing-33c-weather-24580806

 

"The scorching heatwave is so hot that England's roads are melting under the sun as councils scramble to fix the damage."

170 dead in Europe too due to flash floods and hundreds missing.

 

 

Edited July 21, 20214 yr by martin-w

One potential upside;  if they're melting that much, they'll self-level and fill in the countless flippin' potholes.... 🙄

26 minutes ago, KevinJH said:

One potential upside;  if they're melting that much, they'll self-level and fill in the countless flippin' potholes.... 🙄

 

😄 So true, the UK's potholes are dreadful.

I remember reading on our councils website when I was in the UK that if your vehicle is damaged by potholes you don't stand a chance of claiming for the damage. If the pothole wasn't reported to the council they say its not their fault and if it was reported they say its not their fault due to not having the resources to fix it in time. 🙄

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/12/potholes-britain-roads-repairs

1 hour ago, W2DR said:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/12/potholes-britain-roads-repairs

 

This bit says it all...

 

Quote

"This sort of thing doesn't happen in Scandinavia or France, where they mend the roads properly," says David Weeks, director of the AIA. "A well-maintained road will withstand snow and ice without a problem. This is a legacy of 25 years of government underfunding and the siphoning of road maintenance money into other projects at a town hall level."

 

Ive seen potholes get repaired than in a few months the hole is there again. What do they fill them with? Bubble-gum? 

Edited July 21, 20214 yr by martin-w

1 hour ago, martin-w said:

Ive seen potholes get repaired than in a few months the hole is there again. What do they fill them with? Bubble-gum? 

When I passed my driving test back in 1961, british roads were regarded as the gold standard. On the other hand, french roads were usually described as very bad and this was given as the reason their cars always had very soft suspension with a very long range of movement to soak up the bumps. Today I find french roads seem to be better than here in UK.

The current situation in the Uk is probably due to road repairs being done 'on the cheap'. Councils contract out the work and the repair crews are often largely unskilled labour to minimise cost for the contractor. I saw examples locally last year where potholes were patched after rainfall, with a couple of inches of filling material laid in the potholes with no attempt to burn off the surface water or dry the work area, so obviously the repairs could never bond correctly and were guaranteed to fail, as several did during the past winter. Remarkably no one ever seems to be held to account for any public works which go wrong, although that issue is probably universal. 

2 hours ago, martin-w said:

Ive seen potholes get repaired than in a few months the hole is there again. What do they fill them with? Bubble-gum?

The U.S. has the same problem. Potholes are generally considered to be caused by the freezing and thawing of water below the road surface. I live in Florida and there has never been anything frozen here. At the exit  from the local shopping center there is a pothole in the road that comes back year after year. One year I counted the times they filled that hole. Can you believe NINE times. I don't know what they used but even bubble-gum would have been better. 

I'm pretty sure that bad roads are a feature and not a bug.  GDP is money moving through the economy and you can raise GDP by first not requiring things to be done well and then constantly spending money to fix the problems.  A similar thing applies to allowing consumers to buy cheaply made products.

32 minutes ago, W2DR said:

I live in Florida and there has never been anything frozen here.

Oh yes there has been and will continue to be times when the temperatures are below 32ºF. Many are the times during Christmas vacation spent with my aunt and cousins in Bowling Green, FL that I've had to help light smudge pots to protect their precious citrus groves from freezing temperatures!

I also lived for about ten years further north in Gainesville, FL where we had more than a few frozen winter days.

Not a new problem by any stretch of the imagination, you only have to listen to the lyrics of the Beatles A Day in the Life to know that the newspapers were reporting about 4,000 potholes in the roads in Blackburn way back in 1967.

18 hours ago, Biggles2010 said:

When I passed my driving test back in 1961, british roads were regarded as the gold standard. On the other hand, french roads were usually described as very bad and this was given as the reason their cars always had very soft suspension with a very long range of movement to soak up the bumps. Today I find french roads seem to be better than here in UK.

 

Its actually reversed now. I was watching a review of a new Audi a few years ago, and the Audi engineer who was in the passenger seat said that for the UK, the cars would have the suspension softer for British roads because they have more "vertical oscillations". 😕