Effect On Road and Rail Transport
In road and rail transport, a washout is the result of a natural disaster where the roadbed is eroded away by flowing water, usually as the result of a flood. When a washout destroys a railroad's right-of-way, the track is sometimes left suspended in midair across the newly-formed gap, or it dips down into a ditch. The phenomenon is discussed in more detail under erosion. Bridges may collapse due to Bridge scour around one or more of the bridge abutments or piers.
In 2004, the remnants of Hurricane Frances and then Hurricane Ivan caused a large number of washouts in western North Carolina and other parts of the southern Appalachian Mountains, closing some roads for days, and parts of the Blue Ridge Parkway for months. Other washouts have also caused train wrecks where tracks have been unknowingly undermined. Motorists have also driven into flooded streams at night, unaware of a new washout on the road in front of them until it is too late to brake, and prompting a high-water rescue.
Major washouts can also ruin pipelines or undermine utility poles or underground lines, interrupting public utilities.
Read more about this topic: Washout
Famous quotes containing the words effect on, effect, road, rail and/or transport:
“Movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century. Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them—as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, and flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“If goodness were only a theory, it were a pity it should be lost to the world. There are a number of things, the idea of which is a clear gain to the mind. Let people, for instance, rail at friendship, genius, freedom, as long as they will—the very names of these despised qualities are better than anything else that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the most envenomed satire against them.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“One may disavow and disclaim vices that surprise us, and whereto our passions transport us; but those which by long habits are rooted in a strong and ... powerful will are not subject to contradiction. Repentance is but a denying of our will, and an opposition of our fantasies.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)