Safety Agency Defends Guardrail Test

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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.

Among critics of the decision on Friday were lawyers in a recent whistle-blower lawsuit involving Trinity’s ET-Plus guardrail, who focused on how the Federal Highway Administration did not apply guidelines the agency had in place in 2003 to judge if a crash test should pass or fail. (The ET-Plus was tested under safety standards used in 2005, when the modified guardrail was first sold.)

Suzanne Emmerling, a spokeswoman for the Federal Highway Administration, said on Saturday that the 2003 study was “not applicable to the crash test results that were analyzed” for the ET-Plus, since that guideline had since been revised and was no longer used.