Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey Brainstuff Lauren
Speaker 1: vogelbom Here. If you've spent a good amount of time
Speaker 1: driving around the United States, especially in rural areas, you've
Speaker 1: probably noticed those messy looking black squiggles that cut across
Speaker 1: asphalt paved road surfaces and what looks like a paphazard
Speaker 1: fashion at best. But arest assured they're not the wasteful
Speaker 1: result of some sloppy tarwork, nor drizzles from your local
Speaker 1: tar tankred transport. Instead, what you're noticing is crack ceiling.
Speaker 1: It's a time honored technique for remedying damaged road surfaces
Speaker 1: without inflicting more pain upon taxpayers by tearing up and
Speaker 1: repaving the entire road and disrupting traffic while that work
Speaker 1: is done. Asphalt is the sticky, binding liquid that sets
Speaker 1: around the rocks and stuff that make up our road pavement.
Speaker 1: That pavement can take a pounding from heavy traffic, for example,
Speaker 1: or from the expansion and contraction that happens during seasonal
Speaker 1: changes in temperature. Cracks develop when stress builds up the
Speaker 1: surface layer of the pavement that exceeds its tensile strength.
Speaker 1: Design and construction flaws such as an adequate drainage for
Speaker 1: rainfall or a weak base underneath the road, can also
Speaker 1: cause the surface to fail. Cracks are insidious because once
Speaker 1: they appear, water can get in not just the cracks
Speaker 1: but the base of the road and cause lots more
Speaker 1: damage as it expands and contracts with the temperature. In
Speaker 1: the arcane, highly technical world of road maintenance, there are
Speaker 1: actually a lot of different types of cracking to contend with.
Speaker 1: One of the most unsightly is fatigue cracking, a which
Speaker 1: turns the highway into something resembling an alligator's hide and
Speaker 1: which usually requires an extensive repair job. Another type of damage,
Speaker 1: reflection cracking, results from movement between the road's asphalt and
Speaker 1: concrete layers and looks more like a jagged gash. There's
Speaker 1: also edge cracking, in which rows of wavy, curved cracks
Speaker 1: parallel the road shoulder. If you've tried to build a
Speaker 1: nice new road every time that stuff happened, it would
Speaker 1: be prohibitively expensive. In introduction to crack ceiling, a two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight treatise on the subject from the Texas
Speaker 1: Engineering Extension Service at Texas A and M University, the
Speaker 1: experts note to that ceiling cracks is way cheaper, about
Speaker 1: two thousand, five hundred bucks per mile of road compared
Speaker 1: to sixty thousand dollars for putting down an overlay surface,
Speaker 1: though of course two thousand and eight was a while ago.
Speaker 1: In twenty sixteen, the city of Littleton, Colorado, estimated that
Speaker 1: crack ceiling cost about five thousand, five hundred dollars per
Speaker 1: laane mile, while overlaying cost approximately three hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars per laane mile. Trick friends a mile is
Speaker 1: about one point six kilometers. These seals aren't actually made
Speaker 1: of tar these days, it's more likely to be some
Speaker 1: sort of high performance polymer asphalt mix designed to form
Speaker 1: a bond that's flexible enough to move with the road
Speaker 1: and keep the crack from growing. A cruise apply it
Speaker 1: to the fissures with a device that looks vaguely like
Speaker 1: a vacuum hose working in reverse. However, although crack ceiling
Speaker 1: can keep a road from deteriorating further, it doesn't make
Speaker 1: the road any smoother. You might not feel it in
Speaker 1: a smooth riding sedan or suv, but some motorcyclists call
Speaker 1: the patches tar snakes and contends that they cause damage
Speaker 1: to bikes or even accidents. Today's episode is based on
Speaker 1: the article what are those wiggles of tar on the
Speaker 1: road on howstufforks dot com written by Patrick J. Kiger.
Speaker 1: Brainstuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with HowStuffWorks
Speaker 1: dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more
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