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.
Because of its safety concerns, Missouri banned further installation of the rail heads on Sept. 24. It joined Nevada, which prohibited further purchases in January, and was followed six days later by Massachusetts. Lawsuits say the guardrails were to blame for five deaths, and many more injuries, in at least 14 accidents nationwide.
The Federal Highway Administration, the agency charged with ensuring the safety of the nation’s roads, continues to say that the guardrails, installed on highways in almost every state, meet crash-test criteria. And the Texas-based manufacturer, Trinity Industries, a large supplier of guardrails nationwide, also denies there is a problem.
But internal communications and documents from the highway administration show that a senior engineer charged with examining the guardrails expressed reservations about their safety, before he signed off on their continued use about two years ago.
At one point, agency officials drafted a letter asking the manufacturer to conduct additional testing, but the letter was never sent, according to interviews and a review of the documents by The New York Times.
“There does seem to be a valid question over the field performance,” the senior engineer, Nicholas Artimovich, wrote in an email to his colleagues in February 2012, after an agency engineer based in South Carolina raised questions about the guardrails.
In a separate email to an outside safety expert a month later, Mr. Artimovich wrote that it was “hard to ignore the fatal results.”
The federal agency continues to allow states to use federal funds to purchase and install the rail heads. Concerns over the guardrails are at the center of a federal lawsuit expected to go to trial on Monday in Marshall, Tex.
