Meanwhile, in Sao Paulo we are getting to 34C (93F) every day, and even the nights have been extremely warm. And here at the southern hemisphere it's winter now.
But hot and dry days are not unheard of, they are just unusual.
First, the forest covering of the Amazon didn't change that much on the last few years. Don't let international press fool you, the forest isn't "all burning down". It's burning down a lot, but not that much.
But more importantly, the rain on that region is mostly from oceanic and local humidity (São Paulo is in a forest area, with plenty of rivers).
It rains less there in La Niña years. I don't know how abnormal the situation really is. But the heat is way more unusual than low humidity.
This is the latest date we have had 30+ temperatures since measurements began in 1901.
And ten years from now we'll remember this as cool.
Apparently they'd expanded from the heat more than they were designed to cope with.
So a 40 degree temperature swing would be 400-800ppm, which means about 1mm difference in length for 2m of steel. Obviously bridges aren't usually made of a single span of steel, but there will be limits to how much expansion a given joint can tolerate, and each half of a draw-bridge needs to be fairly rigid. On top of that, 40 degrees is probably much less than the difference in road temperature between a cold night in January vs. a sunny day in August.
Railway tracks used to buckle in the heat before they built them with a small gap between the rail spans.