{"id":1057,"date":"2026-07-24T10:07:31","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T10:07:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1057"},"modified":"2026-07-24T10:07:31","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T10:07:31","slug":"one-mans-quest-to-fix-every-deadly-guardrail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1057","title":{"rendered":"One Man\u2019s Quest to Fix Every Deadly Guardrail"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Steve Eimers met Melissa Falk at Bethel Baptist Christian Academy, in upstate New York, when she was a senior and he was a junior transfer student. Steve, the son of a local preacher, bet a classmate that he\u2019d be dating Melissa by Christmas; to expedite the process, he superglued his hand to hers in class. He lost the bet, but still managed to win her over. They married in 1996. Their first child, Hannah, arrived three years later. She had her father\u2019s blue eyes, and, as she grew up, his sympathy for outcasts and his love of J. R. R. Tolkien became hers, too.<\/p>\n

Read more Grocery Shopping in the Age of Explosive Diarrhea<\/a><\/p>\n

Steve and Melissa homeschooled Hannah. They had moved to eastern Tennessee in 2001, for lower taxes and more land. Steve started a window-washing business, and they began acquiring goats and chickens. Soon, they had two more children. Steve had always imagined that he\u2019d adopt one day, and, when their kids were growing up, he travelled to Eastern Europe with their church to donate supplies to orphanages. In 2007, he and Melissa went to Ukraine, where they met children who, he said, \u201cwere going to get trafficked or conscripted\u2014who had no chance.\u201d The couple came back with three boys. They had another biological son a few years later. That made seven. Steve thought that was plenty, but, in 2013, he and Melissa heard about a pair of siblings in northern Tennessee, ages nine and thirteen, whose parents were opioid addicts, and so the family took them in, too. Then, in 2016, a friend of Hannah\u2019s accidentally became pregnant, and Melissa gave Steve a familiar look. \u201cWe were in our early forties,\u201d he told me. \u201cWe were tired. But Hannah said they were talking about termination.\u201d They decided to adopt the baby. That made ten.<\/p>\n

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The Eimers bunch enjoyed playing Uno\u2014the Ukrainian boys learned the game before they understood English\u2014and walking to local waterfalls together. Hannah was a generous older sister. She\u2019d contributed to the cost of her siblings\u2019 adoptions by putting on magic shows, and, once they arrived, gave up her own bedroom. She was bright, curious, cheerful, and easily fixated on unusual things, another quality she shared with her dad. \u201cShe\u2019d sing at the top of her lungs in Walmart to test societal norms,\u201d Steve told me. She trawled thrift stores and worked at the mall as an Easter bunny. By twelve, she was reading Tolstoy. By fifteen, she\u2019d matriculated at a local community college. The summer after her freshman year, she interned on the set of a Burt Reynolds film. She wanted to work in costume design one day.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Melissa remembers watching Hannah dress up for a party on Halloween in 2016. She was going as an obscure character from a live-action role-playing game. Hannah had told her parents that the party was in Athens, and at first they had assumed she meant Athens, Tennessee, about forty minutes away. But the party was actually in Athens, Georgia: a four-hour drive. That night, Hannah and a friend set out in Hannah\u2019s Volvo S80, a car her father had picked because it had a good safety rating. \u201cI remember it like a snapshot,\u201d Melissa told me. \u201cHannah putting on red lipstick and a white shirt, looking in the mirror across the hall. She was super chipper. It was a singsongy goodbye.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the early hours of November 1st, Hannah was driving home when her Volvo drifted off Interstate 75 and collided with a steel guardrail. She was sober and was going under the speed limit but was tired\u2014she\u2019d nodded off, apparently, as her friend slept in the passenger seat. Hannah\u2019s car hit a safety feature known as a terminal end, a black-and-yellow-striped rectangular box at the end of the rail, designed to absorb kinetic energy. In a collision like this, the terminal end should give way and slide along the metal strip of the rail, slowing the car down and forcing the rail to curl up before it. Instead, this guardrail tore through the Volvo and cut Hannah\u2019s body in half.<\/p>\n

Steve was filling a coffee mug, preparing to go deer-hunting, when Hannah\u2019s friend\u2019s mother called to tell him there had been an accident. (The friend was unscathed.) When he reached the authorities, they said that no emergency transport had been dispatched to the scene. Steve understood that this meant there had been no doubt that Hannah was dead. He and Melissa got in their car and drove toward the crash site, but stopped midway. \u201cI lay down in a Walmart parking lot,\u201d Steve told me. \u201cI couldn\u2019t move. Our pastors came and picked us off the ground and took us home.\u201d Eventually, Steve collected some of Hannah\u2019s hair from the Volvo\u2019s back seat. Months later, Tennessee\u2019s Department of Transportation mailed the Eimers household a bill for three thousand dollars, asking Hannah to pay for the guardrail that killed her. (The agency eventually apologized, claiming that there had been \u201ca mistake somewhere in processing.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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One day not long after Hannah\u2019s death, Steve Eimers felt an urge to look up \u201cguardrail crashes\u201d on the internet, and discovered hundreds of news stories about cases where people had been maimed or killed when striking them. He learned that what happened to Hannah occurred often enough that the guardrail world has a term for it: \u201cspearing.\u201d As he carried out more research, he also came to believe that the guardrail involved in Hannah\u2019s crash was defective. In 2017, he filed a wrongful-death suit against Lindsay Corporation, the manufacturer of the rail, alleging that it did not follow federal and state guidelines for the design of guardrails, and that, because the company had failed to provide adequate instructions, the rail had been improperly installed. The suit was settled in 2022 for an undisclosed sum. (The settlement terms prohibit Eimers from discussing what was wrong with the rail involved in Hannah\u2019s crash.) After that, Eimers shut down his window-washing business and began to focus full time on a new mission: preventing anyone else from dying the way Hannah did.<\/p>\n

Eimers has since driven some forty thousand miles through twenty-five states to inspect guardrails. \u201cI can identify types of guardrails from satellite view,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt\u2019s urban bushcraft.\u201d He documents many of these inspections on his YouTube channel, best known by its handle, @TheGuardrailGuy, where he posts videos of himself roaming the country with calipers, a six-foot level, and an eye for backward bolts and loose cable anchors. The videos, which he broadcasts to some quarter of a million subscribers, have an endearingly unvarnished quality. In a typical one, Eimers might choke up; break down a complicated concept in physics; quote one of his favorite film protagonists, the bumbling shopping-mall security guard Paul Blart; or utter an adopted Southern colloquialism such as \u201cdadgummit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Melissa is astounded that he has so many fans. She finds the minutiae of guardrails \u201cextremely boring.\u201d While she sleeps, Eimers stares at images of guardrails across the world, checking for fatal flaws. Faulty rails spring from his memory the way other people recall bad dates. He told me about a rusted-out guardrail in Townsend, Tennessee, with a mouse living inside of it that bit his finger, and a guardrail in rural Georgia from the fifties that was missing eighty-five bolts. He continued, \u201cI once walked from Constitution Avenue to the White House and found that the five guardrails closest to the President were installed with random parts. They still are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Based on his research, Eimers believes that there are about a thousand guardrail-related deaths each year in the U.S.\u2014virtually all of them preventable\u2014and tens of thousands of miles of dangerous guardrails presently on the country\u2019s roads. He maintains an extensive archive of research, which includes a record of every time a President mentions guardrails (as Donald Trump did in 2018, when he remarked on a \u201csucker\u201d guardrail: \u201cI want to hire whoever their salesman is\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. that is the worst crap\u201d). In what Eimers calls a \u201cmaster impalement log,\u201d he keeps lists of various kinds of crashes\u2014crashes involving the brand that killed his daughter, crashes involving a rail installed upside down or backward, crashes involving celebrities. Also \u201coddities,\u201d as when \u201ca truck full of Pop-Tarts hits a guardrail days after the inventor of Pop-Tarts dies,\u201d leaving Pop-Tarts \u201call over Interstate 640.\u201d He uses this material to work the press. Jennifer Titus, a Tampa Bay TV reporter, has done dozens of stories with Eimers, and remembers the first call she got from him. \u201cI had no clue what he was talking about,\u201d she told me. \u201cI said, \u2018Look, can you just find me a dozen improperly installed guardrails on Florida roads?\u2019\u00a0\u201d The next day, he sent her a list of seventy; Titus confirmed their dangers independently. \u201cThe state reinspected all the guardrails in Florida as a result of our inquiry,\u201d she said. \u201cHe files as many open-record requests as I do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI know I\u2019m not normal,\u201d Eimers told me. \u201cI\u2019m one of those people who count ceiling tiles. My weird brain latched on to guardrails, and it won\u2019t let go.\u201d A guardrail-company executive recently told me, \u201cSteve evolved from a grieving father to a vindictive-seeming father to a credible individual to the Erin Brockovich of the guardrail industry.\u201d He went on, \u201cHe\u2019s in the top ten per cent of the most knowledgeable people in the room at a meeting of guardrail experts.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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On a Saturday in early March, I met Eimers on the shoulder of a four-lane highway outside Lenoir City, Tennessee, the town near Knoxville where he and his family live. Many of his neighbors were fishing for crappie. But for Eimers, who is fifty, it was a big day: he was going to meet his congressman, Tim Burchett, whom he\u2019d been lobbying about guardrails since 2017. As I approached, Eimers, in jeans, a reflective vest, and a cap that read \u201cGuardrail Guy,\u201d was looking at a steel rail a few feet from the blacktop. The rail, he said, had been damaged by \u201creckless pounding.\u201d He recalled Trump\u2019s rhetoric about bureaucratic obstacles to solving relatively simple problems. \u201cWe have the President talking about \u2018the speed of Trump\u2019 and \u2018we\u2019re going to break down these walls,\u2019\u00a0\u201d he said. \u201cWell, break down these<\/em> walls, for crying out loud!\u201d Soon, Burchett pulled up in an oversized pickup with expired tags. He is a sixty-one-year-old MAGA<\/em> conservative who lives on a farm and builds longboards from scrap wood. Wearing a suit, seemingly against his will, he offered Eimers a fist bump. \u201cHey, dude,\u201d he said turning to me.<\/p>\n

To the casual observer, which is to say virtually everyone, a guardrail is just a long wavy strip of steel, about a foot wide, set thirty inches or so off the ground, which keeps a car from going off the road. But, in reality, guardrails are carefully calibrated systems of interlocking parts, every one of which is critical to its function. They rely on complex physics to insure that a car that hits the end of a guardrail doesn\u2019t get impaled, and that a car that hits it from the side can\u2019t crash through. Some guardrail injuries result from antiquated designs, or designs that manufacturers know to be dangerous. Others result from botched installation.<\/p>\n

Eimers directed Burchett\u2019s attention to the rail he had been looking at, and pointed out that it had a misshapen post, which had probably been damaged during installation. In a head-on crash, posts like these and their special bolt notches should release the rail, causing it to curl up like ribbon beside the vehicle. \u201cI call this the LeBron James post, because when it\u2019s hit, it has to flop over,\u201d Eimers told Burchett, who stared silently. This one, Eimers went on, was unlikely to do that, because of the bludgeoning of the post and the placement of the bolts. Many guardrails, he added, are even more messed up. In 2022, Eimers bought a few thousand stickers with an arrow and the words \u201cTHIS SIDE UP<\/em>\u201d on them, which he then slapped on guardrails installed backward or upside down. He made a video of the stickers, which has been viewed sixteen million times; a major guardrail manufacturer, Valtir, subsequently produced an installation sticker of its own.<\/p>\n

Eimers wants the government to do more to encourage good corporate behavior. \u201cThey\u2019ve abdicated their role to a guy from rural East Tennessee with ten kids, thirty chickens, and a bunch of goats,\u201d he said. Burchett, who had previously been in the state legislature and now chairs DOGE<\/em>\u2019s congressional subcommittee, which examines the use and misuse of federal resources, said, \u201cWe hated the federal government for good reason. I hate it and I\u2019m in it<\/em> now. I hear you.\u201d He told Eimers that he\u2019d try to get a congressional hearing on the topic of guardrails.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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After the meeting, Eimers and I drove to his house, where I met Melissa, who was fixing sweet tea, and a few of their children. Then we walked around the back, to what the family calls Hannah\u2019s Garden, a little pergola featuring painted references to some of her favorite things\u2014Dorothy\u2019s ruby-red pumps from \u201cThe Wizard of Oz,\u201d the time machine from the TV show \u201cDoctor Who\u201d\u2014alongside a typewriter and a ukulele. \u201cThere wasn\u2019t a whole lot to bury,\u201d Eimers said, before he turned away and began to cry.<\/p>\n

The term \u201chighway\u201d can be traced back to Old English, and originally referred to elevated Roman thoroughfares. In the U.S., the word came into circulation around the start of the twentieth century, to denote roads that were grander and more adaptable than rural post routes, which were maintained by the government, or the longer, privately funded thoroughfares known as \u201cauto trails.\u201d In 1921, the Federal Aid Highway Act gave the word an official definition, subjecting it to regulation. At that point, the country had some nine million touring cars, including the popular Ford Model T, which could reach a white-knuckling forty miles per hour. Road surfaces were disconcertingly variable\u2014dirt was most common, but pebbles, bricks, and creosote-soaked wooden blocks were also used. There was no overarching plan connecting the states. As a later report put it, the Federal Aid Highway Act aimed to, at minimum, \u201cget the farmer \u2018out of the mud.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

Thirty-five years later, President Dwight Eisenhower signed another major highway act, which would create more than forty thousand miles of federal highway\u2014still the largest public-works campaign in American history. As cars and roads multiplied, accidents began to pile up; by the mid-sixties, there were more than fifty thousand fatal highway accidents per year. The automobile industry downplayed the dangerous designs of vehicles and pointed to unsafe drivers instead. Many of the highway-safety features that we consider standard now were afterthoughts. \u201cA lot of people felt you should not light highways\u2014that it was distracting\u2014and that a nice wide median was all you needed between opposing lanes,\u201d Earl Swift, the author of \u201cThe Big Roads,\u201d a history of America\u2019s highways, told me. \u201cSo these things, like guardrails, came along piecemeal.\u201d<\/p>\n

The earliest guardrails, constructed in the thirties and forties, basically resembled those of today. But their blunt ends, which did not release upon impact, were even more deadly. In 1932, as the Times<\/em> noted, in one of many such stories, a sailor on furlough died when his Ford V8 Tudor \u201cimpaled itself\u201d on a Nebraskan rail. Among the earliest proposed solutions was the turndown guardrail, which, instead of ending abruptly, gradually slopes downward into the ground.<\/p>\n

Read more I\u2019ll Pay Twenty Thousand Dollars to Skip Your Jazz Show<\/a><\/p>\n

In March, Eimers and I visited Dean Sicking, a mechanical engineer and an inventor, who has contributed to almost every major guardrail innovation of the past four decades. Sicking, a bearded and bespectacled sixty-eight-year-old, lives with his wife in Birmingham, Alabama, in a large French-country-style house. Sitting in his kitchen, he remarked, dryly, that the turndown was \u201ca brilliant idea, apart from one thing.\u201d Where it had prevented the possibility of spearing, it introduced a new problem: the launch. \u201cIt\u2019s like \u2018The Dukes of Hazzard,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Eimers explained.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Sicking has designed and patented groundbreaking safety technologies for football (helmets), equestrian sports (helmets), and hockey (boards). In 2007, President George W. Bush honored him with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, which hung on one of the walls in his kitchen. Guardrails have proved to be his greatest challenge. He began working on them in 1980, when he was a junior researcher at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. Using data from General Motors, he started to predict accident rates, and came to believe that safety was a tractable problem. \u201cOur basic philosophy was that running off the road shouldn\u2019t carry a death sentence,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s guardrails are designed to absorb or redirect collisions coming from angles of less than twenty-five degrees, as the overwhelming majority of guardrail crashes do. When a vehicle hits the face of the rail\u2014the side you see when driving past\u2014the rail should bend but not break, holding tension, like hockey boards or seat belts. This prevents the car from crashing through the rail\u2014known as \u201cgating\u201d\u2014or flying over it. Though turndown guardrails can still be found, most now begin and end with the rectangles of steel known as terminal ends. Their ability to absorb the energy of colliding cars\u2014forcing rails to curl up, rather than spear\u2014is the result of decades of clever engineering.<\/p>\n

Sicking\u2019s inventions include the ET-2000, patented in 1989, a terminal end that would grab on to a colliding car to slow it down; the Sequential Kinking Terminal, from 1997, which used kinks or bends in the rail to help absorb an impact; and the Next Generation Terminal, the first design to prevent cars from breaching a rail when they hit it from a glancing angle. \u201cAssuming installation isn\u2019t fucked up,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In America, guardrail systems are sometimes installed\u2014and, much more often, repaired\u2014by local crews of laborers who have no real familiarity with how they work. As one guardrail executive told me, \u201cOften you get guys that are plowing snow in the winter and cutting grass in the summer.\u201d He went on, \u201cThey go to a yard where they\u2019ve got a pile of parts\u2014a bracket here, bolt there, a rail that looks like it\u2019ll fit\u2014and they install it.\u201d In guardrail jargon, the practice of assembling a rail with a hodgepodge of parts is known as Frankensteining. Because Frankensteining disrupts the physics involved in guardrail systems, it can be deadly. In 2010, a man in Florida swerved to avoid an animal in the roadway, striking a guardrail maintained by untrained prison inmates. He lost a leg. According to the man\u2019s lawsuit against the state Department of Transportation, the rail had been constructed using a \u201crandom collection of parts\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. including an obsolete piece of guardrail built in 1965.\u201d Eimers estimates that about five per cent of the guardrails he inspects are Frankensteined together.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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On our visit, Sicking told Eimers that if Hannah had crashed into one of his innovations, correctly installed, she\u2019d be alive. This wasn\u2019t news to Eimers, but he began to sob. Then he suggested that we take a ride. Eimers drove the two of us to the closest guardrail, which was also the closest defective guardrail. \u201cDr. Sicking lives around the corner from a monstrosity,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The rail, which lined a four-lane road near an overpass, was an egregious assembly of one of Sicking\u2019s older designs. \u201cWe have some major, major issues here,\u201d Eimers said. He pointed to an empty inch-long opening in the middle of a steel panel, then to a bolt drilled into a post a few inches away. The empty slot was where the bolt should have been. He surmised that the installers had mismeasured the length of the panel and \u201csolved\u201d the problem they\u2019d created by drilling a hole where there hadn\u2019t been one. When struck, this bolt wouldn\u2019t release\u2014the improvised slot was the wrong size\u2014and the rail would not curl up, as it should. Instead, a terminal-end collision would likely result in a spearing or a rolling of the vehicle, Eimers said, and if a vehicle hit it from the side the rail might rupture. Sicking looked on mournfully. \u201cIf you\u2019re drilling holes in my guardrail, you\u2019re fucking up,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

I asked Eimers, who once worked as an emergency nurse, how the guardrail might damage a human body if it was hit head on. \u201cA C1 or C2 fracture,\u201d he guessed, referring to potentially fatal neck injuries. \u201cA lacerated aorta. A mutilated victim.\u201d He guided Sicking around some fire ants to inspect a bearing plate\u2014a small piece of metal that anchors the first post to the guardrail and helps distribute force. It was also misaligned. \u201cThey just pounded the ever-living snot out of this,\u201d Eimers said disgustedly.<\/p>\n

In April, Eimers and Melissa travelled to Atlanta to meet with a few families who had lost relatives to guardrails. Eimers lists his phone number on his YouTube page to make it easy to reach him. \u201cEvery time I see a number I don\u2019t recognize, I get this feeling in the pit of my stomach,\u201d he told me. \u201cBut I have to pick up.\u201d All of the families he met that day had relatives who, like Hannah, had been killed on I-75, the highway that runs from near Miami all the way up to the Canadian border. Jaida Payne, a doctoral student in physical therapy, was killed in January, 2023, when she crashed into a damaged rail in Tampa. In March, 2020, Hunter Burns, a garage-door installer, hit a guardrail installed upside down and backward in Bradenton, Florida. That same day, Isabella Alonzo, a high-school senior, hit a Frankensteined guardrail near Warner Robins, Georgia. Payne was twenty-three, Burns twenty-two, Alonzo eighteen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Eimers had already been in close touch with their parents. \u201cIt takes a special kind of person to live through the horror, and then to keep putting himself in position to see it, experience it, on a daily basis,\u201d Cathy Alonzo, Isabella\u2019s mother, told me, of Eimers. \u201cBut sometimes you have to slow him down and tell him to explain all these darn guardrail abbreviations in English.\u201d Cathy has a tribute to Isabella tattooed on her forearm that reads \u201cSHE IS THE MOON, A SHINING LIGHT IN THE DARK SKY<\/em>.\u201d Mark, her husband, remembered their daughter\u2019s accident and the attempts to save her. \u201cShe had a strong heart, and they brought her back four times before she just bled to death. I had to stop them from reviving her, because\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d He paused. \u201cAnd the bad thing about it is they left that guardrail there for months.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christy DeFilippo, Hunter Burns\u2019s mother, who was wearing a polo shirt with the words #HuntersMom embroidered onto it, described the rail that killed her son. \u201cInstead of crumpling like an accordion, like it\u2019s supposed to, it launched him in the air,\u201d she said. Payne\u2019s father, Stewart, a former Marine drill instructor, had been dabbing his eyes with a napkin. He had recently become the newest member of what Eimers calls his Army of Davids\u2014as in David and Goliath\u2014a group of guardrail-reform advocates which is trying to get companies to release more detailed instructions for installers and lobbying governments to enact installation and maintenance laws. He had started a guardrail-focussed TikTok account called Exit 261, named for the location of his daughter\u2019s death. He described Jaida\u2019s guardrail impact as \u201clike an I.E.D.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf that guardrail was repaired right, she would have survived,\u201d Payne said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe shouldn\u2019t know each other,\u201d Eimers agreed.<\/p>\n

The morning after Eimers showed Burchett the faulty rail near Lenoir City, he forwarded me a bill he\u2019d stayed up late drafting, titled \u201cGuardrail Manufacturer\u2019s Transparency Act.\u201d (He considered putting \u201cIKEA<\/em>\u201d in the name, to signal the simplicity that guardrail installation should aspire to, but decided against it.) Among other things, the bill sought to mandate clearer labelling for guardrail parts, and to require that manufacturers distribute setup manuals in various languages, including Spanish. He sent it to Burchett\u2019s office, then e-mailed to follow up, writing, \u201cSomebody\u2019s child hangs in the balance.\u201d A few hours later, he e-mailed again with a message about a girl who had just been killed by a guardrail in Maine.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In late April, Eimers went to D.C. to make his case in person. He wore a \u201cGuardrail Guy\u201d T-shirt, and carried an Emmy won by a TV reporter for a segment they\u2019d worked on together. The city was choked with traffic thanks to a visit from King Charles. Eimers had a tea bag in his pocket, which he occasionally pulled out while remarking, \u201cNo kings.\u201d He was accompanied by several families who had been affected by guardrail accidents. One of the people with him was Jett Weinstein, a twenty-year-old from Arizona who lost a leg in 2024, when, on the way back from a snowboarding trip, a car he was in hit a guardrail and was speared. His friend, who was driving, was cut in half and killed. \u201cI\u2019m always in pain,\u201d Jett said, matter-of-factly.<\/p>\n

The group\u2019s first meeting was with Steve Cohen, a Democratic congressman representing a West Tennessee district. Seated beneath a poster on the wall reading \u201cOne man can make a difference, and every man should try,\u201d Eimers placed the Emmy on a table before him and delivered his pitch. At one point, he offered Cohen the opportunity to be \u201cthe Guardrail Guy\u2019s assistant.\u201d Cohen was surprised that systems as complex as guardrails didn\u2019t come with instruction manuals. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to believe,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve got a CD: thirty-two dollars, and it\u2019s got thirty-four dollars\u2019 worth of instructions.\u201d<\/p>\n

After bumping into Senator Richard Blumenthal in a hallway\u2014\u201cI\u2019m Steve, the Guardrail Guy,\u201d Eimers began, to Blumenthal\u2019s bewilderment\u2014they met with Senator Mark Kelly, an engineer and a former astronaut who represents Arizona, in Kelly\u2019s office, where he displays one of his old space suits. Kelly was particularly struck by an e-mail from 2005 between executives at Valtir\u2014then known as Trinity\u2014which Eimers had obtained through an anonymous source and printed out. It showed an executive discussing a guardrail the company had modified in 2005, and effectively admitting that it had become more dangerous. \u201cWhat will be our liability exposure if someone has an accident and the folded rail enters into the vehicle [and] kills or maims someone? Then the lawyer finds this crash test and says that it is inherent to the design for this to happen. It did it during the crash test.\u201d The company, the executive acknowledged, \u201cput a faulty design into the world.\u201d Kelly kept the printed e-mail.<\/p>\n

A few weeks after Eimers\u2019s D.C. trip, Burchett\u2019s legislative director e-mailed him a draft of the Surface Transportation Reauthorization bill. The bill would be part of the proposed reauthorization of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a trillion-dollar funding package passed in 2021, which expires in September. Of the eight-hundred-odd-page bill, more than eight pages\u2014the entire section on guardrails\u2014were effectively lifted from Eimers\u2019s \u201cTransparency Act.\u201d When Eimers called me to share the news, he was nearly shouting: \u201cIt\u2019s almost one per cent my language!\u201d The bill\u2019s text is currently being finalized before a likely vote this fall. In late June, Eimers also learned that the guardrail we looked at with Sicking had been fixed, after the state carried out a reinspection, prompted by a complaint Eimers had filed. The Frankensteined guardrails closest to the White House were finally scheduled for replacement, too, thanks to him. \u201cI often get cynical, because I expect one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turns,\u201d Eimers told me. \u201cI once had someone tell me that the most influential people in history often only ever get a one-degree turn of the ship, which seems inconsequential\u2014but over time you end up at a completely different destination.\u201d He added, \u201cMy problem is that I know that I am, on a subconscious level, looking for something that will take away the pain. I could get every highway guardrail in the world fixed, and it wouldn\u2019t fix me or bring Hannah back.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Eimers is fond of quoting from a scene in Tolkien\u2019s \u201cReturn of the King,\u201d when the humble hero Sam thinks, \u201cIn the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.\u201d Hannah loved the hope in that line, Eimers told me. He mentioned something she\u2019d written in her diary ten months before she died. \u201cI realized why I\u2019m writing this journal,\u201d she wrote. \u201cI am absolutely terrified I\u2019m going to die and just be another face in the photographs.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Names are forgotten. They don\u2019t have stories.\u201d She went on, \u201cAs long as I can keep the interest of whoever is reading this, I have a reader. There. Now you\u2019re in my story. Hope that keeps you interested, whoever you are.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Jane Wickline Is Down to Clown in \u201cDukes\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charles Bethea reports on Steve Eimers, otherwise known as @TheGuardrailGuy, whose daughter Hannah died in 2016, when she hit a defective guardrail. Since then, Eimers has roamed the country inspecting rails for fatal flaws.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1056,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-letter-from-tennessee"],"yoast_head":"\nOne Man\u2019s Quest to Fix Every Deadly Guardrail - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1057\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"One Man\u2019s Quest to Fix Every Deadly Guardrail - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Charles Bethea reports on Steve Eimers, otherwise known as @TheGuardrailGuy, whose daughter Hannah died in 2016, when she hit a defective guardrail. 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