News highways

10/24/14

Trinity Industries, facing mounting criticism that its guardrails can impale drivers in crashes, said on Friday that it would stop selling the product, which 13 states have now banned, until further testing could be completed.

The announcement is a sharp reversal for the company, which had continued to sell the guardrails even as state after state this week said that they had banned further installations.

10/14/14

Concern is mounting over the safety of guardrails sold by Trinity Industries, as yet another state has threatened to stop buying them, and will consider removing them.

Virginia, in a letter sent to the company on Friday, told Trinity that state transportation officials did not believe Trinity had properly tested the end of a guardrail it redesigned in 2005. Virginia officials also told Trinity, which is based in Dallas, that the company had made changes to the design without telling them.

10/24/14

Federal highway officials had long insisted that guardrails throughout the state were safe. But some guardrail heads had apparently malfunctioned, in essence turning the rails into spears when cars hit them and injuring people instead of cushioning the blow, Missouri officials said.

“The device is not always performing as it is designed and intended,” a Missouri transportation official wrote of the problematic rail heads in an internal communication.

4/29/15

Trinity Industries has received a Justice Department subpoena seeking more than a decade’s worth of records on its guardrail products, the company disclosed late Wednesday.

The Justice Department is pursuing a criminal investigation into Trinity and its dealings with the Federal Highway Administration over the the company’s ET-Plus guardrail system, according to people familiar with the matter.

Click here for the New York Times article Safety Agency Defends Guardrail Test – 3/15/15

The federal agency charged with investigating a potentially dangerous guardrail defended its methods of analysis, after it was criticized for giving a guardrail a passing grade in a crash test despite severe damage to the driver’s door.

Click here to view the full story from the Wall Street Journal

Two public-safety advocacy groups want a Texas judge to unseal court records they say are unnecessarily being kept secret in a whistleblower lawsuit that questions the safety of thousands of highway guardrail end caps made by a division of Trinity Industries Inc.

Click here to view the full article from Bloomberg

Before dawn on Feb. 23, Darius Williams ran his Nissan Sentra off a North Carolina interstate at 80 miles per hour. A length of guardrail pierced his door, according to the police report, driving the 24-year-old’s body into the opposite back seat.

Project overview
From HIV/AIDS to malaria and tuberculosis, poor countries endure more than their share of health crises. Now they are stalked by a new nemesis on course to claim even more lives—highway fatalities.

Launched August 12, 2013