Weather fluctuations doing a number on road infrastructure
While this season’s warm spells might break the winter blues, they’re also busting up roads in the region.
Freeze and thaw cycles play havoc with roads, meaning city staff are out repairing pot holes daily as temperatures fall below zero at night and spike above freezing during the day.
“It doesn’t take a long time, like an overnight freeze will impact the roads very much,” said Michael Hausser, Cambridge’s director of operations.
“Every freeze thaw cycle that we experience between day and night is really hard on the roads, especially roads that already have cracks in them or have had potholes. Any water that goes into those cracks and potholes on a quick overnight freeze will make it worse.”
The state of infrastructure in a municipality also affects how well roads will hold up during fluctuations in the temperature.
Hausser said all cities in the region, province and country are facing some level of gaps in infrastructure.
“We’re all more or less in the same boat,” he said.
While Hausser said he couldn’t quickly produce numbers on how many pothole repairs Cambridge does in a day, city staff gears up for more work when the weather changes. Road inspections are done daily.
However, Hausser said because of the constant work by city staff on roads, he isn’t seeing much difference this year — besides not having to salt and plow roads, which also affects the stability of the asphalt.
To help battle cracked and deteriorating roads in Cambridge, the city will employ a spray patching unit, which can seal and repair potholes and cracks in the fall, so they don’t form again in the spring.
Cambridge also use a hot asphalt mixture — while some municipalities use a cold mix — to fortify pothole fixes.
Digging past the roads, deep freezes and thaws also degenerate water main pipes. Longer freezes, like at the beginning of this winter, creates frost deeper in the ground. This causes soil to shift and water mains and service lines to break. The same thing happens again if the soil is frozen deep and a quick thaw comes.
So far this winter Cambridge has had nine water main breaks, which Hausser said isn’t uncommon.
“A few of those main breaks early in the year, we had a very deep freeze and certainly had some breaks because of that,” he said.
“But if infrastructure is already at the end of their life, those kind of freeze/thaw cycles will impact those much harder than infrastructure that’s in good condition.”