Are Guardrail End Terminals Safe?
When we drive down the road and look off to the side, there is usually a guardrail that is designed to prevent a vehicle from driving off of the road. The end terminal of the staple of the American highway system is being looked at after an independent investigation. What’s going on with the end terminals, and how are they causing more severe injuries and even deaths on our highways?
The end terminal of the guardrail is designed to deflect and even reduce the impact into the guardrail when it is crashed into head-on. However, a revised version of Trinity Industries’ end terminal, known as the ET-Plus, has been causing more injuries and fatalities. A study by the University of Alabama at Birmingham sponsored by The Safety Institute and the State of Missouri, has shown that the ET-Plus was “1.36 times more likely to produce a severe injury and 2.86 times more likely to produce a fatality than the ET-2000 design.” The ET-2000 is another version of the end terminal that Trinity produces.
Instead of reducing and deflecting the guardrail impact, the rail becomes a spear as the end terminal fails to do what it’s designed to do. A change of one inch is all it took, and the inventor of the end terminal, Dr. Dean Sicking, was not involved with the change. The design change saved Trinity $2 per end terminal, or $50,000 per year and $250,000 in 5 years. However, those savings appear to have cost not only limbs, but lives as well.