r a weekend crash near the Sunshine Skyway Bridge<\/a> left a backseat passenger dead. Investigators say the driver fell asleep at the wheel before veering off the road and hitting a tree. According to the Florida Highway Patrol, the car came to rest in front of an aging guardrail \u2014 one Eimers says could have made the tragedy even worse.<\/p>\n\u201cThat\u2019s a major point of concern,\u201d Eimers said. \u201cWe have to take responsibility as drivers to wear seatbelts, but we also rely on DOTs across the country to follow more than 30 years of federal guidance. And yet we still have these BCT terminals on the roadside.\u201d<\/p>\n
The device Eimers is referring to is the Breakaway Cable Terminal, or BCT, the end piece of a guardrail system designed in the 1960s and installed widely through the 1980s.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a very old, obsolete piece of safety equipment,\u201d Eimers said. \u201cIt has not been considered crashworthy under modern testing standards. Even under the 1993 NCHRP Report 350 standards, it could not pass crash testing.\u201d<\/p>\n
A U.S. Department of Transportation report documenting a 44-mph crash test showed the BCT failed to perform as intended. The Federal Highway Administration in 1994 issued a memo declaring BCTs \u201cno longer acceptable for installation on high-speed, high-volume roads.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the agency did not order states to immediately remove existing BCTs, it directed transportation departments to replace them when damaged or when roadwork occurred in the same area and to upgrade them to terminals that meet crashworthy standards.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a high-priority location,\u201d he said of the guardrail near the Skyway Bridge. \u201cAnd even here, we still have a piece of equipment that hasn\u2019t been crashworthy for the better half of a century.\u201d<\/p>\n
When 10 Investigates asked the Florida Department of Transportation back in 2023 about BCTs still in service, the agency said upgrades occur by what was recommended in the memo.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs new construction projects take place, or as guardrails are damaged, FDOT replaces guardrails with current inventory from our Approved Product List (APL),\u201d the department said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Eimers believes that approach isn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not crashworthy. It cannot redirect our modern vehicle fleet,\u201d he said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t work. And we\u2019ve known that for 50 years, with federal guidance for 30 years telling us it doesn\u2019t work. We have to invest our dollars in upgrading our barriers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over the last two years, 10 Investigates has been checking out potentially problematic guardrails lining our roads as part of the series\u00a0Unguarded<\/a>. Because of the team’s reporting, the state launched a statewide review that uncovered one third of the state’s guardrails needed to be repaired or replaced. It’s all part of a 30-minute Emmy-winning special, Unguarded, streaming now on 10 Tampa Bay+. Look for it under Special Reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A highway safety advocate’s concerns were renewed this week after a weekend crash near the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61737,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-61736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}