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As if the cancellation of flights and trains due to moves and shortages hadn’t disappointed travelers enough this summer, the European heatwave has come to exacerbate travel chaos. Extreme heat can be harmful to people’s health, even deadly, but it also affects the built environment. It can cause expansion and deformation of metal and asphalt surfaces, making roads, rails, and tracks difficult or harmful to use. This has disrupted thousands of trips this summer.
The fact that the rails deform and the asphalt “melts” (or softens and deforms) became evident in July when temperatures topped 40 degrees Celsius in many European countries, setting many new records. On July 18, a small segment of the runway at London Luton Airport in the United Kingdom became so hot that it began to take flight. The runway had to be closed for two hours while engineers repaired the surface, and some flights were diverted and others were canceled. Across Europe, many railway facilities have been cancelled due to heat distorting the rails.
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Due to climate change, heat waves are becoming more intense and frequent, so transport infrastructure must adapt. There are already projects underway to keep the infrastructure cooler. Many are undeniable concepts involving specially designed plants, paint, or shadows. Meanwhile, fabric scientists would possibly find more complex solutions, such as heat-resistant metals. But upgrading the infrastructure is neither undeniable nor cheap.
Railways and roads are vulnerable to heat, says Giovanni Forzieri, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Florence. In 2018, Forzieri and his colleagues observed how heat waves and other excessive weather events, such as floods, forest fires and windstorms, can damage European infrastructure in the future. Currently, Europe’s shipping sector suffers 800 million euros ($820 million) in climate-related damage during the year, yet during the last decades of the century, researchers estimate that the figure will have risen to 11. 9 billion euros ($12. 2 billion). About 90% of the damage is due to heat waves.
With railways, the difficulty is that metal rails can heat up 20 degrees Celsius more than room temperature and are therefore vulnerable to excessive temperatures. Therefore, before placing a new track, the metal rails are heated and then cooled in a controlled manner to make them face higher temperatures, with other remedies allowing the rails to work on other temperature windows. In the UK, rails operate relaxed around summer temperatures of 27 degrees Celsius.
But if it’s too hot, the rails expand and are restricted through the anchor that holds them in place, which energizes them and can lead to buckling, where the rails deform. Slowing down trains can lessen the threat of this collapsing because trains at slower speeds put less pressure on the rails. That’s why network operators across Europe have had to impose transient speed limits that have led to costly delays and cancellations this summer.
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One solution is to paint the rails white, which reflects sunlight and can keep the rails cooler between five and 10 degrees Celsius. In the UK, Spain and Switzerland, operators had already started doing so before the heat wave. Of course, many parts of Europe enjoy temperatures above 27 degrees and manufacture their rails to work in windows of warmer temperatures. However, if rails in places like the UK are replaced with rails suitable for warmer climates, they may not be able to cope with the low temperatures of winter. Steel contracts and becomes brittle when exposed to cold, which means the rails can crack if pressurized when it’s colder than your operating window. “It’s a very complicated situation, because temperature levels are much higher in countries like the UK,” Kiran says. Tota-Maharaj, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Aston University in Birmingham.
Some countries use forged concrete slabs to cope with temperature fluctuations, as they hold the rails in position more firmly, but charge around 4 times more than popular tracks in the UK (which have rails attached to sleepers placed in the most sensitive part of the ballast). Network Rail, which owns and operates more than 30,000 kilometres of tracks, bridges and tunnels across the UK, says it is neither practical nor cost-effective to apply such responses: there are very few summer days with temperatures above 27 degrees Celsius. “If a heat wave occurs later this summer, or even next year, communities in other cities will have to prepare for transportation delays,” Tota-Maharaj said. “It’s not an overnight solution. “
Temperature diversifications between summer and winter also affect the asphalt surface of roads, which is necessarily an aggregate of sand, gravel, crushed stone, and a sticky binder called bitumen, a semi-solid form of oil. Because the asphalt is black, it has a tendency to temporarily heat up in the sun. As a result, bitumen becomes softer and the asphalt surface stickier and is more likely to be broken by vehicle pressure, as happened in July in Manchester, UK and Lucerne, Switzerland. Adding polymers to the asphalt aggregate can raise the softening point to about 80 degrees Celsius, but it makes curtains more expensive. This aggregate is normally used only for high-traffic surfaces, such as motorways outside Milan and Madrid.
Increasing damage to critical infrastructure from heat waves is one thing. But the costs of operation and maintenance (OR
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Prevention is better than cure, and trees and plants can play a role in this regard, especially in cities where sidewalks, buildings and other surfaces absorb and heat stores. The municipalities of Central Europe have planted grass between the tram tracks that pass through their cities. to reduce the risk of buckling of the rails. Researchers in Warsaw, Poland, wrote in a 2018 study that tram greenways not only cool the surrounding area through evaporation of rainwater, but also eliminate noise and are well-earned by the public.
Some cities in Germany and Switzerland even need to become Schwammstädte (sponge cities) by covering the asphalt and cement of buildings, streets and sidewalks with trees, grass and wetlands. Several studies have shown that trees can cool streets and buildings through windows and roofs. Birgit Georgi, an independent expert who advises EU projects and municipalities on climate change adaptation strategies, says adaptation should be taken into account when planning, maintaining or renovating public infrastructure to minimise costs. all the measures now, but keep them in mind,” he says.
Georgi says measurements based on nature or adjustments in curtain composition can also be implemented outdoors in cities. However, it may be necessary to implement them gradually. Roads and tracks are periodically renewed every 10 to 15 years, depending on the volume of traffic. The rails also have a lifespan of several decades, but engineers maintain them every few years. And yet, Georgi says, climate resilience is developing more slowly in shipping than in other sectors. “The challenge with shipping is that there are many actors involved in a system. most likely to become more frequent, delays in mitigation can also mean many more delayed trips in the future.
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