Gritters helping tackle melting roads in heatwave

Gritters have laid more than 200 tonnes of tar and chipping to prevent roads from melting in heatwave weather conditions.

Cornwall Council's highways engineering firm Cormac said it had attended up to four incidents of road surfaces melting in the county due to the recent high temperatures.

Network manager Steve Bayley said crews were proactively out surface dressing to help roads which were "potentially vulnerable to the heat".

He said teams had carried out "quite a few kilometres" of surface dressing in the last month, even if it felt "odd" to see a gritter out at this time of year.

During the process, the road is sprayed with bitumen binder before stone chippings are spread onto this and pressed into the surface by a rollers.

"We're doing some proactive treatment in most cases because we're out there doing surface dressing which most people refer to as tar and chippings," Bayley said.

"While that's freshly laid, it can be quite vulnerable to that temperature, so we go down and actively spread 3mm (0.11 inches) gritter dust - sort of crushed stone - to try and stay on top of that temperature and stabilise the material."

Bayley said the loose chippings were left on the road to protect surface treatment, and when they had been bedded in, the roads were swept two or three times to remove the excess.

The work can only take place during warm periods of the day to be "effective".

He added: "We've been much more on the case this year in terms of proactivity to get to the point where we're preventing it becoming a problem."

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