todayilearned

I worked for a year at an asphalt plant (producing the road pavement stuff you drive on). The liquid asphalt, or "AC" as it's called, is stored at around 600-800F (IIRC) to stay liquid. When there is an AC leak, or you're doing maintenance on the wet elevator or silos, and you get AC on your clothing, the only way to remove it is with diesel fuel. There were many times I had to basically bathe in diesel fuel.

There is a "recycle crusher" that breaks down old asphalt grindings to add back into the mix in some recipes. That thing makes a lot of fine black dust from the crushing hammers. When it sticks to your skin it won't let go without diesel or rash inducing levels of scrubbing. The funny part is that you can't really scrub it off of one area; the eye line around your eyelashes. Every time we had to service the recycle crushing hammers, I looked like I was wearing eye liner for a week.

It was a rough job...

Diesel is the primary solvent for asphalt. In fact, the "cold mix" that gets made for patching potholes is just old hot mix asphalt that the loader operator soaks in diesel fuel and tosses with the loader bucket a few times. If you take anything from this, diesel can dissolve asphalt over the course of a few soakings in a day or few. Like you could make it all the way to dirt using very little effort from a pick axe to break up the loose taffy.