A new gas supply is being laid in the street. The contractors have dug a hole outside my house, put a board over it and filled the gaps with "Easy to use cold lay Bitumen Macadam". This is obviously temporary. After 24 hours the Macadam has not gone hard as I would have expected it to. Anybody know why it is still soft?
The stuff they use on roads and the stuff in plastic bags is nearly the same but in bags it has had emulsified bitumen added. This has to dry out to set whereas road bitumen simply has to cool down.
I have seen someone very effectively put bagged stuff on a large steel sheet and heat the under-surface using a gas burner. Most of the water evaporated leaving fairly hot, fairly dry stuff which set relatively speedily.
The contractors have carelessly left a bag of this stuff outside. Ahem .... "Please note that the product will take longer to set in hot weather" is on the bag. I thought it would be the other way round.
We had a leak under the public footpath, level with the boundary between ourselves and the attached semi. United utilities arrived while I was at work, dug it up, repaired the leak and took the opportunity to fit new stop taps for both houses. This meant that the old flags wouldn't fit and they had to take them away to cut accesses for the lids. They temporarily filled the hole with that junk.
Now, I knew nothing of this when I got home in semi darkness. I reversed into the drive, got out at least 8 feet into my drive and nearly 30 across from where they'd done the work. The phone was ringing, so I rushed in and answered it. I was on the phone for around three quarters of an hour and pacing around the hall. At the end of the call, I turned on the hall light and found bitumen marks all over the carpet.
Further investigation revealed that (presumably) people walking up and down the pavement had spread the stuff at least 30 feet in each direction and there was somehow even a considerable amount in my drive! I'd of course got a piece stuck to my shoe.
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