Apparently, while I wasn’t paying attention, Minneapolis plunged into a heat wave. (I suspect this says something about the temperature-control powers of my 1920s stucco house. That, and my husband’s practice of opening the house and turning on fans over night, and then closing all the windows in the morning. ) We hit a new record high—97 degrees F—yesterday afternoon, and more of the same is expected today.
But here’s the really fun part: The heat caused serious highway damage in 21 different spots around the Twin Cities yesterday. We’re not talking about gaping chasms opening up or anything. But heat and humidity do make concrete expand. If there’s no place for it to expand to—as in the middle of a highway—it can buckle along the weakest point. The result: Sudden, big potholes where potholes did not used to be. Also: Traffic jams.
Bear that expected bad traffic in mind today, if you’re joining me for the Twin Cities edition of the 1st Annual International BoingBoing Meetup Day. On the plus side, it’s not likely to rain on us, right? Maybe we’ll go for a purifying dip in the waters of Creek Minnehaha.
Via Amy Nelson
Image: American Film, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from swanksalot’s photostream. Not a highway in Minneapolis, but buckled concrete, nonetheless.