America Wasn’t Built for This

America is melting. Roads are buckling everywhere from Houston to Aurora, Colorado, and in June caused traffic jams in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Last week, a New York City bridge that had opened to let a ship pass got stuck after expanding in the heat, forcing thousands of commuters to detour. The mid-June heat wave led to thousands of flight delays; more recently, even Toronto’s Pearson International Airport warned travelers to brace for heat-related complications. Commuters along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor have been harried by heat-induced delays for weeks.

The train delays have affected an especially large population. The Northeast Corridor is the most trafficked commuter rail system in the country, with over 750,000 daily commuters. In late June, Amtrak notified customers that trains in the corridor could face delays of up to an hour in the coming weeks as heat interfered with tracks and overhead power lines. Since it issued that warning, tens of thousands of people have experienced heat-related delays.

Amtrak estimates that severe weather, including extreme heat, storms, and floods, will incur $220 million in lost revenue in the coming decade. That will only compound problems for the beleaguered rail company, which is facing a backlog of $45 billion in Northeast Corridor repairs, Fortunereported. Some of the corridor’s bridges and tunnels were built more than a century ago, and the price tag for repairs has been accumulating for years.

Making the necessary infrastructure improvements won’t just mean replacing old equipment with new. It will also require that new equipment be able to withstand high temperatures that were far less common just a decade ago. Solids, and especially metals, expand in the heat, which can warp rail lines if they’re not protected against high temperatures. Overhead power lines, meanwhile, tend to sag on hot days, Mikhail Chester, the director of the Metis Center for Infrastructure and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University, told me. Most light rail lines have counterweights to balance that sag, but those often aren’t heavy enough to counteract the extreme effects of high heat.

Asphalt, too, tends to expand and soften in the heat, causing headaches for motorists and road crews. In Wisconsin and Washington State, where asphalt is the favored paving material, heat warped some roads so badly they were forced to close, and traffic on Wisconsin’s I-41 was partially restricted when high temperatures caused a joint to fail. In June, a highway through Wyoming’s Teton Pass collapsed from a landslide that authorities have attributed to unusually rapid snowmelt, blocking a critical route for commuters to Jackson Hole and Yellowstone. The closure could prevent nearly half of the workforce in the area from making it to work, CBS reported.

While cities in the Southeast and Southwest have also reckoned with heat-related challenges, it’s notable that many of the most pronounced infrastructure meltdowns recently have occurred in ordinarily cooler parts of the country. The reasons are twofold, Chester told me. First, cities in the hottest part of the country tend to be newer, meaning they built more of their base infrastructure in more recent (and warmer) decades. Second, these cities are simply more used to the heat. In Phoenix, it’s not unusual for a summer day to top 110 degrees Fahrenheit — on Friday, when I spoke to Chester, it reached 116 degrees. That kind of heat poses an undeniable risk to outdoor workers, young athletes, and under-resourced populations, Chester said, but it also means that civil engineers build infrastructure with heat in mind.

In Phoenix, “the infrastructure is much more designed to the environments — these high temperatures — than a place like Rhode Island is,” Chester said. Whereas Phoenix has always been hot, the climate in the Northeast is “significantly different at this point, climate change being one of those major changes.”

That’s not to say Southwestern infrastructure is anything close to heatproof. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory found that pavement temperatures on Phoenix streets frequently exceed 120 degrees on hot days, with many reaching between 140 and 160 degrees. Skin-to-pavement contact at those temperatures can cause severe burns; one Arizona burn center saw a 60% uptick in severe contact burns between 2022 and 2023, Axios reported.

National media coverage of climate-resilient infrastructure tends to focus on large federal legislation such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, but the standards set by professional societies like the American Society of Civil Engineers are at least as — if not more — influential, and far less sensitive to the ebbs and flows of national politics. Though not legally binding, these standards are often used as a model for local licensing authorities.

“A lot of states and regions and cities in the United States will look to those guidelines to adapt,” Chester said.