A Frosty 25 Degrees This Morning

[Henry]

This is the type of day I hear friends of mine talk about that live elsewhere.  There is nothing but a bright blue cloudless sunny sky.  I definitely have to get out and do some work today.  Got to check with Don Pigeon and see if he has a spot where I can dump a 5 gallon pail of broken asphalt paving.  For some reason it keeps breaking on the edge of the road and when cars go by, it shoots them on my lawn and that does do a job on my lawn mower blades, not to mention if a car happened to be passing when I hit one.  I usually try to stop when I see a car coming if I am shooting grass towards the road.

Channel 3 had a segment on burning brush and they mentioned that if you are burning on a hill that the fire can go up the hill far faster than you can run it.  Never realized that, but certainly is something to think about if you are planning on burning something.  I haven't heard the fire department out to any brush fires yet, but not always near my scanner.

Enjoy the beautiful day and its still way too early to plant stuff unless you want to do a lot of covering at night.

[Henry]

Still 44 inches of snow at the stake on top of the mountain and haven't heard if the Notch is open yet.

[BCota]

One reason that the edge of the pavement tends to do that is from lack of adequate compaction.  Typically it is a roller compactor and it is not uncommon for the operator to pass just shy of the edge of the roadway.  Also, if the road is crowned, the compactor may not put as much pressure on the edge as it does toward the middle of the road.  Both of these conditions will result in reduced density & higher permeability of the edge of the pavement.  This allows water to get in there which freezes and thaws and eventually causes the pavement to fail like you are observing.  In addition to this, stress induced from wheel loads at the edge of the roadway are always higher because there is not as much area to distribute the weight of the vehicle; in comparison to the middle of the road where there could be 8-14 feet of pavement to spread out the weight in each direction, the edge may only have a few inches in one direction.