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
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“Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“We all have—to put it as nicely as I can—our lower centres and our higher centres. Our lower centres act: they act with terrible power that sometimes destroys us; but they don’t talk.... Since the war the lower centres have become vocal. And the effect is that of an earthquake. For they speak truths that have never been spoken before—truths that the makers of our domestic institutions have tried to ignore.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“In one notable instance, where the United States Army and a hundred years of persuasion failed, a highway has succeeded. The Seminole Indians surrendered to the Tamiami Trail. From the Everglades the remnants of this race emerged, soon after the trail was built, to set up their palm-thatched villages along the road and to hoist tribal flags as a lure to passing motorists.”
—For the State of Florida, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)