Trinity Industries Inc.’s guardrail system passed a second round of government crash tests following allegations that it sometimes locks up when hit and spears crashing cars instead of slowing them. ADVERTISING Trinity Industries Inc.’s guardrail system passed a second round
Trinity Industries Inc.’s guardrail system passed a second round of government crash tests following allegations that it sometimes locks up when hit and spears crashing cars instead of slowing them.
State transportation officials have been awaiting the results from the Federal Highway Administration, which said Friday that Trinity’s shock-absorbing ET-Plus system didn’t penetrate the cars in the four latest government-mandated tests.
At least 42 states and the District of Columbia have suspended installations of the Trinity system pending new data on its safety. States have installed about 200,000 ET-Plus units around the country, the FHWA has said.
It’s up to states to decide whether to start allowing use of the ET-Plus again, said Gregory Nadeau, the FHWA’s deputy administrator.
“They all make those determinations in their own way,” Nadeau said Friday in a press call. “We believe the contribution we’re making will assist them.”
The announcement follows the agency’s Feb. 6 finding that the ET-Plus had passed the first four of eight crash tests.
The FHWA required Trinity to re-test the system on Oct. 21, a day after a Texas jury ruled in a whistle-blower lawsuit that the company defrauded the U.S. by failing to disclose product changes it made around 2005. The revisions went unreported to safety regulators for about seven years and, according to lawsuits, caused guardrails to malfunction.
Plaintiffs have tied at least eight deaths and more than twice as many injuries to accidents involving the ET-Plus.
The ET-Plus is a “robust” system that has been “successfully crash tested more times than any product of its kind,” a Trinity spokesman, Jeff Eller, said in an emailed statement.
The highway agency’s evaluation of the ET-Plus’s safety isn’t complete. A joint task force with state transportation representatives is evaluating hundreds of crash reports on accidents involving ET-Plus systems, and the government may require further, more stringent testing of the device.
“Everything they’re doing is very interesting, but it still fails to answer the question, ‘Why are we seeing these failures in the field?’” said Sean Kane, president of Safety Research & Strategies Inc., a product-hazard research group, in an interview before the results were announced.
The FHWA’s latest review hinged in part on the outcome of a Jan. 27 test in which a guardrail deformed the car’s driver-side door. Video footage shot from a helicopter by a San Antonio TV station showed a 1998 Geo Metro being driven into the end of an ET-Plus. The guardrail folded over and pushed in the driver-side door.
U.S. safety standards require that deformations of the occupant compartment “that could cause serious injuries should not be permitted.” In its report, the FHWA said that there was no actual penetration of the vehicle by the bent guardrail.
According to the report, an independent reviewer found that the guardrail drove the door in as far as the steering wheel and appeared to strike the test dummy’s upper leg. After the crash, the intrusion measured 6.75 inches.
The reviewer — Clay Gabler, a professor of biomedical engineering and mechanics at Virginia Tech — said a driver would have been “unlikely to have been at risk of serious injury.”
Gabler’s review of the crash-test data found that the ET- Plus had passed.
The FHWA also consulted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which said there was only a “low risk of serious injury” to a driver’s lower leg.
ET-Plus critics including Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, have raised questions about the FHWA’s review process, saying that accidents have shown the system has vulnerabilities the latest tests didn’t encompass.
He and others have also said that a “worst-case” version of the ET-Plus, manufactured with the design dimensions most likely to cause failure, has never been crash-tested and reviewed by the FHWA.
In an interview before the results were announced Friday, Blumenthal said the FHWA may have had a conflict of interest in reviewing the testing. In 2012, after learning of Trinity’s 2005 modified version, the agency reviewed old crash-test data and retroactively declared that the revised system was crashworthy and acceptable for use on federal highways.
Now, he said, the agency may be affirming its earlier conclusion to avoid “a humongous admission of error.”
In December, Bloomberg News reported assertions of two guardrail-industry professionals that Trinity made another round of secret changes after 2005 to address the alleged car-impaling defect.
One was Joshua Harman, the successful whistle-blower plaintiff in the Texas suit who also runs guardrail businesses in Virginia. The other was Dean Sicking, a paid consultant in the lawsuit against Trinity who makes royalties from sales of an ET-Plus competitor.
On Wednesday, the FHWA released a report that said the vast majority of modified ET-Plus systems in America fall within the product’s design specifications from 2005, which allow for variation in some of the dimensions.
The report also found that the ET-Plus systems used in the eight recent crash tests were representative of those installed on U.S. roadways.
